Sunday 14 August 2022
Parking lottery
Walking back after a stroll around town, Mrs H and I saw a young woman in a battered old car trying to park by the side of the road. Her car was rather like my father's before he finally gave up driving. Dents and marks at all four corners.
She was attempting to fit her car into a tight space between two other cars, a space I certainly wouldn't have tackled. Leaning out of the window, she inched backwards and forwards and somehow it was possible to tell she wouldn't manage it. The space was just too tight.
As we continued up the road we heard the inevitable bump. The driver climbed out of her car to inspect the damage, something she must be quite familiar with by now.
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8 comments:
I've just lost the knack of parking these days...
Although the mirrors are supposed to dip on reversing, as I had to re-stick them, the glass isn't quite right so I leave them in situ, and therefore muck up reversing most times!
And I apply the rule that in supermarkets, the blokes always park as far away from the shop as they can, and leave the dinks and dents to the lazier drivers!
We used to live in a Victorian terraced house in a narrow road, and despite paying £120 every year to the council for the privilege of parking on the highway outside our home, it was often difficult to find a space. The wife and I got to be brilliant at parallel parking. It's just a matter of knowing the little visual cues on your car, and lining them up correctly. But occasionally, little scrapes occurred.
Andrew from next door came round. "really, really sorry, Sam, I've just bashed your car..." We went out and I found we had just exchanged a tiny bit of paint.
"No worries, Andrew. These things happen. I expect I'll be returning the compliment some day..."
And I did. He didn't mind, as again it wasn't a bodywork job. Then Sarah from the other side touched our car when getting into a particularly tiny space, and we had to reassure her through her tears that we really didn't mind. These things happen.
Then I very gently nudged the Volvo belonging to a solicitor who had one of the other houses as a holiday home. He thanked me in a gentlemanly fashion for letting him know ("Very decent of you, Sam. Most people would just clear off...") and a few days later presented me with a bill for £700.
If you want to see incompetent parking go to Australia.
I once did a straightforward piece of parallel parking with two Aussies in the car only to be accused of showing off.
(Their driving isn't much cop either.)
Scrobs - we follow that supermarket rule but online deliveries mean we don't have to do it very often. We don't go at busy times either - that helps.
Sam - that sounds very civilised apart from the solicitor. We sometimes drive along a long local street of terraced Victorian houses with nose to tail parking on both sides of the road. It always strikes me how occupiers owning their own horseless carriages would have boggled the minds of the miners who first lived there not much more than a century ago.
dearieme - it surprises me that our driving seems to be fairly good compared to many other countries. The worst driving we've encountered recently was a cyclist.
We had a near-neighbour universally referred to as "the drunken barrister". She once knocked my wife off her bike and threatened to sue.
She wrote us a threatening letter about a garden fire we'd allegedly lit. But in fact we'd been away on holiday that week. Et bloody cetera.
dearieme - was the letter written in green ink? I once had one of those.
I remember being somewhat horrified at the parking "skills" employed when I visited Paris many years ago. Your "To & Fro" description is not good enough for them - in order to get into the smallest spaces involved repeated contact with the cars in front & behind. And it didn't matter WHAT those other cars were - a battered 2CV or a shiny new Porsche...
microdave - I've heard of that parking technique but I've never seen it used. I suppose the owner of the shiny new Porsche just has to learn about parking in Paris.
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