With the return of school comes ferrying Daughter Number Four to her various extra-curricular activities: a process that involves constant re-scheduling, calling in favours, giving favours and split-second timing.<\/p>\n
And on one such a barely-made-it day, Herself had settled down to wait among the other parents: some of them proudly observing their child, some of them nakedly bored and some of them furiously typing into laptops in an attempt to reassure their employers that they were indeed working from home.<\/p>\n
One of the venue staff appeared among them and, in a rather embarrassed tone, read out a car registration number and wondered if anyone knew it?<\/p>\n
It was Herself\u2019s. She was asked to come outside.<\/p>\n
As you may have noticed, even though there are lines painted in carparks, their width can be arbitrary: sometimes so narrow that it seems to require the vehicle to suck in its gut and squash in there. You can be in between the lines, but still uncomfortably close to the next vehicle.<\/p>\n
The next vehicle in this case was a small tank with tinted windows. The owner of the tank probably could have squeezed in the driver door. Or gone in the passenger door and climbed across. But instead, she got someone to find Herself so she could say: \u201cIs this a joke?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s difficult to frame an answer to that question. No one ever entered a carpark with the intention of performing some really hilarious parking. Puzzled, Herself didn\u2019t reply, so the women asked again: \u201cIs this a joke?\u201d<\/p>\n
It could have been that this woman wasn\u2019t referring to the parking situation at all, but life in general: she was clearly stressed, angry, maybe running late. Perhaps there were a myriad of other difficulties in her life that brought her to conclude that existence is a vast cosmic joke: the inevitable result of late-stage capitalism.<\/p>\n
Herself didn\u2019t feel equipped to answer that question either, so she took a deep breath and opted to be all Zen about it.<\/p>\n