England's Christmas Car Parks - Any Driver's Nightmare!

Hi. Weekend again and our Christmas countdown has really started in earnest; time for last minute shoppers to have their tail lights vaporised by irate, car park escapees – a phenomenon that makes Cannon Ball Run appear positively docile. Whose bright idea was it to position the bays at ninety degrees anyway?

Drivers, more often than not, now wave at one another with single, festive, raised fingers – or two. Then there’s the ultimate rebuke, the clenched fist ‘up and down you-should-be-polishing a pole’ wave for the more adventurous. A last resort, though as this may well result in loss of blood and hefty fines. However, freeing one’s car from most high street supermarket car parks takes nerves of steel and firm control of the road rage syndrome. If common sense had prevailed from day one and our mastermind, line painters had thought the job through before unleashing their paint brushes, all our frustrations and insurance claims would, to this day, remain virtually nonexistent.

Why then, (sticking out neck time) weren’t the lines painted at an angle? How much easier it would be to glide in or out of a car park space without fear of hospitalisation. Perhaps we could borrow some line painters from so called third world countries? They seem to have got it right – fifty years ago...

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An English Boy’s Wanderings in Africa; an excerpt:

... Apart from that, things went pretty normally and from my shadowy den amongst the bougainvillaea I got on with my education. The pattern was always the same – ten sun-crazed, semi-inebriated adults sitting under a tin umbrella in some far-flung tropic – all of them talking at once. Then everyone went quiet and my father managed half of ‘Nellie Deen’ before mother got back from the ladies room. She gave my dad a hard stare, scowled about for more insects and then re-took her place at the water hole. No one mentioned the insect and my father never finished his Nellie Deen.

Sometimes I went treasure hunting round the beer garden; people dropped money and couldn’t find it in that sort of half dark. If you crouched down and looked at an angle the money showed up between the fag-ends and chip packets, but you had to be careful picking things up because there were scorpions and spiders; ‘big hairy bastards’, dad called them. Aunt Ann said they were baboon spiders – big as side plates with nippers big enough to have a dogs leg off at the knee. Found one by mistake when I reached under a table for what looked like a sixpenny piece and moved a chip packet. Stood up like a fox terrier and looked me in the eye, never forget it; long hairs all over it, bit like an upside down armpit. When they get angry they sort of do press-ups and wave their front legs at you. Uncle Ron said to my dad that was time for you to ‘fuck off smart-like.’ Anyway, the best I ever did without getting bitten was two bob – two shillings in posh money.

The waiter came back to our table; twice because his tray wasn’t big enough. Always the same – six, quart bombers and four gins with lemon and ice and tonic water – the latter to stop you getting malaria, aunt Ann always said. A coke with a straw and a packet of chips for me, if they remembered, otherwise dad would shove a shilling in my hand for me to get my own.

I think the bar closed at half past ten, but that didn’t matter because everyone bought two drinks and carried on talking; leaning on the table, cigarettes all pointing inwards like red eyes moving about in the dark. When the drinks were finished everyone stood up at the same time and in a murk of Lancashire dialects, Geordie twang and other accents foreign to Africa, said things like, that’s it ‘til next Friday then or bloody hell is that what the time is, and then teetered off like bemused penguins for the car park. Everyone walked like their legs were broken and when they got to their cars it always took forever for them to find their keys. Uncle Ron usually dropped his and said rude words when he knelt on a thorn or a stone. We were always first to leave. Let the others go, mother would tell my dad, but he never listened because we had a Morris Minor now with red insulation tape on the steering wheel where the sun had cracked it; and anyway, in Africa, men were always the boss – that’s what my dad said...

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