DON’T fret, readers – I have no intention of turning this into a weekly car-related column.

But the column I wrote recently about parking did make me think a little bit more about another, slightly separate, issue.

Parking was the root cause of an argument I witnessed not that long ago outside my daughter’s school.

One person was blocking one side of the road and the other person, rather than waiting for a proper gap to open up so that they could move past and move on with their day, had decided to take a moment to address the issue with the offending driver.

The two drivers were taking verbal lumps out of each other, both hanging out of their windows trading abuse, and I thought to myself, oh my goodness, if these drivers could only see what this looks like to the casual observer.

Clearly, both parties felt wronged and were willing to pursue the perceived slight by loudly haranguing each other in full sight of quite a number of other adults and a lot of children, too, in a public place.

This is not the first time I have seen a row of this nature happen in that exact spot, and I have also witnessed, as I am sure a lot of us have, strangers fighting with each other about space in supermarket car parks.

There was something depressing about the sight, and about the whole incident, and I thought – with a blush – of all of the times when I have lost my temper myself.

I experience horrible road rage when behind the wheel and am well aware that part and parcel of losing your cool is your temporary inability to think clearly.

But watching other people engage in embarrassing conflict is a lesson for all of us who might even have had such a tiff in public or will have one in future, given that it forces you to see behaviour similar to your own from an impartial observer’s perspective.

The larger issue behind all of these tiffs is, quite probably, the level of anger and stress we seem to be experiencing these days.

Why do people seem to be so furious all the time, and so angry with each other? A lot of us move through our days spoiling for a fight and ready to take offence with people we do not know so swiftly that our resulting reactions are out of all proportion.

It could be because we are so fed up with the general complete rudeness of everyday life that we have lost all ability to properly address less serious situations.

When one person bumps into us, or jumps a queue, or doesn’t thank us for letting them out of a junction, or cuts us up in traffic, instead of letting it go, or being mildly irritated, we react to every single time has happened to us all at once in a giant overwhelming ball of fury.

Needless to say, none of this stress is doing any of us any good, but what’s to be done about it, I don’t know.