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Our dog has worked out how to open the back door of our house. If she could also learn to shut it this might be a good thing. But it’s quite a thing to see her coming in and out as she chooses. And no doubt the first step in a Planet of the Dogs situation.
Any preconceptions that the countryside might be a calmer and more polite place were blasted out of the water today. I went to Waitrose in Hitchin, because I am being sponsored to do the most middle class things imaginable. As I drove into the car park there were plenty of spaces, but being a human being and thus lazy, I wanted to get one as close to the supermarket as possible. So that I can become unfit and die a premature death. As I drove along the last row of cars I saw someone pulling out of a space very near to the door. I was delighted. I drove towards the space, passing a couple that were one or two spots away (but not quite as close to the supermarket) and then when the car pulled out, I swung in. As I swung in I saw a car coming around the corner and the driver had unseen by me, also been waiting for this spot. But significantly I was already halfway into the spot. Because I had been waiting too.
I couldn’t see it would matter, because there was another spot right next to the car I was parking next to. But the woman at the wheel disagreed. She had been waiting for this spot (for maybe 15 seconds maximum) and so she thought it was her’s. But I had been waiting just as long. And was halfway into the spot. And there was another spot nearly next door. And loads of other spots too. Surely no one would create a road rage incident about this.
You are wrong to think that. She wanted to. She beeped her horn and shouted furiously and rudely at me from the off. I think had she been a little more polite I might have kow-towed to her demands. But I knew we had been waiting the same length of time (or I had been waiting two seconds longer) and I knew there was nothing that made this her space and the fact that my car was already halfway into it pretty much made it mine.
I pointed out the other spots nearby. “You park there, this is my space,” she shouted. She wanted to wait as I backed out of the space and went into another space, so she could have this particular spot. I thought it was crazy. I also thought she was coming the wrong way up a one-way lane, though I was wrong about that I later spotted.
If we’d both been driving round the carpark for half an hour and then this one spot came up and I had swung in as she tried to reverse into it I could understand this level of ire. But all that had happened was that she hadn’t seen me waiting to go into it (as she was round the corner) and this was a 50-50 call, which no one had to worry about due to there being other spaces. And so near. Should that fact have meant I could afford to be the bigger person and let her have her way?
Maybe at some point in my life. But she was so unreasonably furious about this - another person thinking the world is a film of which they are the star so everything must be for them- that I just said fuck it and drove in. She drove past, shouting “Cock” at me. And parked five feet away.
Kindly I had taken the hit and would exercise less than her and thus shorten my life as I lengthened hers.
It’s not the kind of behaviour you expect in Waitrose. Usually I am the uncouth one!
