The perils of passive-aggression

I collect LittleBear from school by bicycle every day. 

We take the same route home from school every day.

And every day the same group of parents stop in the middle of the path, at a point where it splits, and prevent anyone else getting past in any direction while they exchange inanities before going their separate ways. They make absolutely no effort to take the additional three steps forwards that would allow everyone else to go about their day.

Today, being a Bear Of Insufficient Sleep and Commensurate Levels of Patience, I snapped, and as I finally managed to cycle past I muttered to LittleBear that I didn't understand why people had to block the path. Which provoked Angry Bloke to shout after me that they were saying goodbye to their friends. 

And I have spent the last six hours stewing on this and feeling stressed and anxious. I am running through in my mind whether I should try taking a different route home so that I never have to risk seeing him again. Or perhaps making sure we spend an extra five minutes in the playground every day from now until the end of the year to make sure we don't encounter them at that corner again. I have been fretting about whether tomorrow he will see me and accost me about my rudeness, or perhaps deliberately block my way. Or maybe he'll push me off my bike? Or tell everyone within earshot that I'm a rude and selfish person? Or find some as-yet-unimagined manner of publicly humiliating me? But it's OK, because I've got all night to lie awake and imagine the things that are as-yet-unimagined.

It perhaps wouldn't be quite so bad if I didn't know I'd been in the wrong to make over-hearable comments instead of just saying "excuse me". Though (in my feeble defence), "excuse me" has completely failed to penetrate on any day so far.

If anyone spots me hiding in the undergrowth near the school, I'm not a weird stalker, I'm just hiding from Angry Bloke and the Path Blockers. Which might be what I name my band when I'm forced to run away from home to escape the howling mob pursuing me with flaming torches and pitchforks over my poor path etiquette.