EMISSIONS:If most of us have lost the ability to park, has evolution passed by those who haven't?
HENRY DAVID Thoreau once wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.
Henry evidently wasn’t in the car park beside Leixlip’s Louisa Bridge train station last Thursday night. I was desperate. But I was far from quiet. I was yelling my face off.
To my shame, I confess that the language emanating from my slavering gob was a tad on the colourful side. Some of the acts in described in my tirade would have given the Marquis de Sade the shudders. Children’s ears were being covered by alarmed parents throughout a five-kilometre radius. Nuns as far away as Maynooth were swooning.
The source of my rage? My car was trapped. A pair of great galloping gobdaws had parked so close that I couldn’t get in the doors. It was wedged like a slab of BMW in an SUV sambo.
Deducing the Hyundai nestled against the passenger door was very slightly further away than the Kia on the other side (albeit by a matter of millimetres), I decided this would be my point of attack.
Now, I’m not a large man. I’ll never make it as a sumo wrestler, no matter how much I dream. But, despite my legendary svelteness, entry proved impossible. I had about as much chance of fitting my pelvis through the gap as I’d have of sticking my fist up my left nostril.
I briefly considered stripping naked, covering myself in car wax and trying to slither myself in. But then I remembered I’d left the wax in the boot.
Ah, the boot. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
Luckily, prescient chap that I am, I drive an estate. Also, fortunately for me, it was pointing the right way. I generally take great pride in reversing into my usual parking spot, which is perpendicular to a concrete wall. Had I done so this time, I’d have been scuppered.
But I’d been in a particularly mental fragile state that morning, even for me. In a befuddled haze, I’d sprayed shaving foam under my oxters instead of deodorant. My snotty-nosed son Turbo had used my only clean shirt as a hanky and I’d mistaken the box of dried catfood for cereal. I was a third of the way through a bowl of the stuff before realising my error. My bemused wife was in stitches. To make matters worse, I was late. I hate being late – sign of a weak character, so it is.
So pride went out the window and I trundled grumpily into the spot, head first. And head first is exactly how I eventually got in.
After wriggling through the tailgate and clambering over the seats, I ended up with my neck wedged under the steering wheel and the gearstick jutting into my unspeakables. Dignified? I cared not. I was in.
Driving off, I began to wonder when exactly it was that the vast proportion of the population lost the ability to park between white lines. It is some form of Darwinism that has passed me by?
Parking is hardly difficult. A manatee with a hernia could master it, given a bit of training.
But it appears we rare few who can still do it are a dying breed as the human brain evolves to rely on cars so technologically advanced they’ve rendered driving skills redundant.
Skill? Pah. What need ye that for when you can buy a car that can park itself?
Now, I could probably still reverse a combine harvester into an eggcup without help. So does that mean I am lower down on the evolutionary scale than some halfwit in a Santa Fe with rear parking sensors?
If I had my way, white lines in car parks would be fitted with small landmines. Stray onto them, and you pay the ultimate price. How’s that for survival of the fittest?
