Women: Know Your Place

It's only 9am and already my day has been ruined. By what, you may casually wonder, by a bloody woman driver that's what. Women should know their place, and behind the wheel of a car clearly isn't it.

They can go on about how clever they are, multi-tasking and all that, well what's driving a car if it's not multi-tasking? You don't handle that particular multi-tasking task very well do you? Childbirth I grant you, you're quite good at that, but I reckon if we had the necessary downstairs equipment we'd be better at that than you too. I mean I'm not saying it doesn't smart a bit, but have you ever had a leather football smashed into your 'nads from ten yards? No, so shut up and stop moaning about it.

This morning's debacle concerns a chance encounter whilst out walking Nogger's dog this morning. I get back to my perfectly car (parked adjacent to the kerb, a respectable 6 inches or so away from it) and shock horror there's a woman sat in the car behind mine. She's not a pretty woman, she's had a bit of a passing acquaintance with the ugly stick to be frank. Almost bludgeoned to death with the ugly stick actually. Think Clarissa Dickson Wright chewing on a wasp, and you're somewhere close. And she has this indignant your big four wheel drive thing is parked too close to my Micra, I can't get out, look on her face.

So I silently load Chummy into the boot and think it looks like she's going to sit there and wait for me to move, that way she'd finally be able to squeeze her Micra out, what with having an extra fifteen or twenty feet of space behind her and all.

But no, she's sat in her car waiting for me to return it seems, just so that the second my reversing lights go on so do hers. So I take mine out of reverse and wait, and bugger me so does she. So I go for reverse again, and so does she. Then she really goes over the top and paps her horn. At me, a bloke. We have the ludicrous situation of a woman attempting to suggest that I am somehow in the wrong.

So I hop out and go round to her window to see what the problem is, she will only wind the window down about half an inch. She's clearly afraid that I might have another ugly stick concealed about my person. "I park here everyday," she hisses, as if that entitles her to some sort of award. "Well you should have had plenty of practice at squeezing out of that six foot gap you've got in front of you then," I wittily retort.

She tops it all off with her reply "I work for the council you know." What is she on about? Does she think that this entitles her to have an empty parking space either side everywhere she goes? "If you touch my car I'll report you." What is she on about (again)? Does "touch" include smash to pieces with a shovel that I thoughtfully have secreted in the boot I wonder, as Chummy looks on with bemusement.

The situation is defused by the return from his morning constitutional of the guy who is parked in front of her. He jumps into his Golf and whisks off all in one swift ten second movement, as a bloke would do, without even having to resort to the nasty reverse gear. She now has enough room to comfortably extricate the proverbial double decker bus, the ugly cow.

Off she tears, attempting to test exactly what the Micra can do in a 0-60 situation.

I look around in a "did you just see that" sort of a way, but apart from Chummy & I nobody seems to have witnessed it. There's a large branch on the grass "Hang on love you forgot your stick!"