I’ve reached an age where, if you’re not careful, you become a serial moaner and drive everyone round the bend. But rather than turning into Victor Meldrew and annoying everyone else, I found myself being the one getting steamed up behind the wheel.

Occasionally I find myself competing with mums in massive 4x4s delivering little Johnnie or Daisy to school. This adds to traffic congestion and it’s annoying they’ve bought themselves cars which are too large for them to control. But it wasn’t bad driving, or even crowded roads, which left me seething in the driver’s seat this time.

It was the complete jobsworth of a lollipop woman who held up traffic at a zebra crossing.

For a start the Highway Code requires drivers to stop at such crossings, so her role was redundant in the first place.

But it wasn’t just her pointless presence. What made matters worse is every time she crossed a group of little darlings she stopped to chat to them on the crossing.

Then, to add insult to injury, she took several seconds more, still occupying the middle of the road, to needlessly wave to thank drivers.

Travelling further afield, I get to use our ‘smart motorways’ - specially created to use active traffic management techniques to increase capacity by use of variable speed limits and hard shoulder running at busy times.

I’m sure you realise I’m quoting from the manual. As anyone who uses these so-called ‘smart’ roads knows, this is nonsense.

What they’ve done is turn three-lane motorways with a hard shoulder into four-lane motorways without a hard shoulder and, as four lanes absorb more traffic, hopefully allowed traffic to flow more efficiently.

This is great until there’s a smash or a breakdown and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

At least with a hard shoulder there was a safe area for a broken down vehicle. And this takes me to my other bugbear.

In our ever-increasingly namby-pamby, health and safety-conscious world why do traffic officers feel the need to close three whole lanes for a broken-down lorry or an over-heating car? Yes, safety is important, but they now err so far on the side of being over cautious that even the most minor incident causes gridlock.

And, invariably, the traffic chaos leads to further bumps. Ironically being overly safety aware leads to more accidents.

Okay that’s enough from Victor Meldrew for one day.