I ended up in a heated debate this morning, with a driver who took exception to me sprawling inelegantly across his nice shiny bonnet. I was a bit taken a back to be honest. I would have thought that if his nice shiny bonnet was so important to him he wouldn't have presented it before me in quite such a careless and unexpected manner. He came out of a side road in front of me with the intention of turning right across my path. I slammed on the brakes but as I was riding up on the hoods and it was p*ssing with rain my braking efforts were not entirely successful and I slowly and inexorably piled into his now stationary car, tipped over the handlebars and half-rolled, half-sprawled my way across his bonnet. I came to rest temptingly close to his windscreen wipers but resisted the urge to remove them.
As I clambered off his car and picked my bike up I was expecting to hear the usual feeble apologies and explanations of 'I didn't see you' etc but instead he launched into a tirade about how he had been stationary so it wasn't his fault and why didn't I swerve round him? After a few futile efforts to point out the glaring flaws in his logic I gave up and made better use of my time ignoring him and checking that my bike was OK. It was. So I left him protesting and pedalled off to work. The biggest disappointment was that there didn't appear to be any damage to his shiny bonnet. I must try harder next time.