The term "road rage" was invented during my years of exile, but it has now lost all its mystery, thanks to the councillors of the City of Oxford. In its wisdom the Council has adopted an anti-motorist transport policy, at the same time providing a hopeless system of public transport . Taken together, these combine smoothly to ensure twice-daily gridlocks for everyone obliged to enter Oxford by road. Thanks to advanced techniques of traffic management, incoming cars approaching the city are forced from two lanes into one. Attempting this manoeuvre yesterday morning, my own vehicle was deliberately rammed very slowly by another driver who managed to damage his own wing mirror. This led to a memorable exhibition of road rage lasting about five minutes. In front of several hundred witnesses, this man swerved across the road, narrowly avoiding another collision with a bus, blocked the traffic and, yelling obscenities, leapt from his car and launched into a personal attack on ours.

His first idea was to get inside our car and punish the occupants, myself and two children. But he was foiled by the centralised locking system, apparently a new one on him since he tried each of the five doors in turn. He then started to punch and kick the car, managing to cause fairly advanced damage to his right wrist. Eventually, realising that there was something wrong with his plan of attack, he switched on an unconvincing grin and tried to persuade me to join him by the roadside for a friendly discussion that was clearly intended to lead to an old-fashioned bout of fisticuffs. Fortunately I saw through this cunning ploy and told him through a narrow gap in the window that he had a nasty temper. One last kick from his Korean trainers and he was off, hopping back into his car and roaring away on to the Ring Road. Needless to say, none of my fellow motorists chose to interrupt their journeys to give evidence against this moron, and there was not a CCTV camera in sight. Where is Big Brother when you need him?

People who become obsessed by Gatso speed cameras are sometimes suspected of harbouring a grudge. In my own case, I have never been fined nor lost any points on my licence as the result of one of these infernal devices, but when I am caught doing 36 mph on some eight-lane highway—as must surely happen—I do not expect to be treated like Mr. Adrian Roberts. Mr. Roberts's Citroen AX was recently photographed by a Gatso camera speeding in Stockton-on-Tees where there was a 30-mph limit. He happens to be the head of Middlesborough CID and a detective-superintendent. In fact, it was he who introduced Gatso cameras to Teesside, ho ho. The photograph supplied by the Gatso camera showed from behind that the driver was a man with short, dark hair, which is what Mr. Roberts has. But when he was asked who had been driving his car, Mr. Roberts said that he could not remember. At this point most of us would have been prosecuted under the tyrannical Gatso laws for failing to supply the name of the driver. But in this case, this charge was dropped by his colleagues in the police traffic department. The decision was later upheld by the Assistant Chief Constable of Cleveland, Ms. Della Cannings.

Deciding after a brief cooling-off period that the road rage man should be prosecuted, I reported him to our police. I was received in the local nick by a very pleasant woman who took down the details and then withdrew to consult her station sergeant. His decision was negative. With no independent witnesses, the chances of a conviction for Mr. Road Rage were too slim. She added that if the police had seen him in action, he could have been charged with assault, criminal damage, dangerous driving and obstructing the highway since the police took road rage seriously. She then went off and, armed with no more than his registration number, looked him up on the computer, returning to say that he lived locally and was "known" and under observation. This hint that this villain might eventually be punished for something or other helped to appease my own road rage and was a psychological triumph by the police receptionist. The police could do with many more like her.