Harptree wrote:We need lorries to have food in our supermarkets etc which I am quite keen on, food that is, and I've always found lorry drivers to be amongst the most skilled and considerate of drivers, as a group, although I guess there is always the odd one. Watching a lorry driver reverse into a small street gets my admiration.
Admiration for the driver but condemnation for the nasty corporate manager sending an anti-social vehicle into a small street.
Lorry drivers are mostly good. As you say, there is the odd one who uses the bulk of their vehicle as a weapon to intimidate other road users in smaller vehicles. I suffer them more when driving our "hot hatch" rather than on a bike, though. The bad ones just pull out usurping precedence and forcing hard braking, probably again because some manager has decided that journey X will take Y minutes with little regard for reality.
I'm quite keen on food too, so that's why I buy from small butchers (at least one of which still slaughters on-site), farm shops, smallholdings and so on, rather than supermarkets, which are ghettos for abused food (HT Russell Howard), at least for so-called fresh food which is no longer really fresh after it's been handled and transported unnecessarily so much, but washed in high-chlorine water and packed in bags filled with CO2-rich air to give it the illusion of freshness until you've bought it.
If you've got a bicycle with a bag on it, it's quite easy to stop and buy very fresh non-lorry-using food as you ride around. Moved by tractors and the smallholding food not even that. That leaves mostly stuff like packets and tins to be bought from supermarkets and that doesn't need to be rushed around. So if you find lorries terrifying, you can do a little to reduce their use, both directly and by not talking as if fresh-looking food has to come from supermarkets.