Zebra Cross

What, exactly, do drivers think pedestrians are doing standing on traffic islands? In my case, this morning, I suppose that, as I was wearing my shorts and was a little pink in the face, I could have been a confused tourist who’d been sold an island holiday by a very unscrupulous travel agent, and I could simply have been standing there enjoying the morning sunshine. But I think, actually, that it was much more likely that I had just crossed one half of the zebra crossing, and was about to start crossing the other half of it, don’t you? So the driver who approached it without slowing and without preparing to stop was probably just being a dickhead who was hoping that if he looked like he was bent on keeping going I wouldn’t step out in front of him and force him to come to a reluctant halt.

Unfortunately for him, I was prepared to be a much bigger pain in the arse than he was. Once I’ve got one foot in the road he must stop – especially when he’s outside the Police control centre – but boy was he unhappy about it. The nose of his car was edged over the stripes in the road by the time he’d managed to brake, and he and his wife – they were both in their forties, old enough to know better – were glaring at me like Daily Mail readers confronted with an asylum-seeking single mother who’d frozen her embryos to further her career. I kept eye contact all the way across, worried that if I broke it for a second, he’d simply accelerate straight over me. Dogs, teenagers, car drivers: never let them see your fear.

Look, I know I was being obnoxious forcing him to stop like that and glaring at him all the way over (although I didn’t do what I wanted to do and drop a handful of change on the road and spend twenty minutes picking it up – I think he really would have killed me). But drivers who don’t give way to people on zebra crossings really piss me off. I don’t have many rights as a pedestrian, but that’s one of them. And all he had to have done was slow down as he saw me – no more than by a few miles per hour so that I could see he was prepared to stop – and I could have been across the road before he’d even reached it. Instead, I made him stop, he made me stop, and both of us went off with the edge taken off our Sunday morning. If drivers keep abusing zebra crossings, they get replaced by pelican ones and those are much worse for all concerned. Especially if pedestrians, annoyed at the loss of their nice zebra crossing, press the button every time they pass it just because, you know, they can…