Standing Room

18 April 2009

It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself.

It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself. Sod equal rights, sod women’s lib and to hell with emancipation. When my car mysteriously vanished outside Waitrose last Friday night I was immediately engulfed by a pathetically primal desire to play the role of helpless victim. I’d parked in good faith — albeit in a bay that had not one, but two large suspension notices; I’d carefully read both signs and deduced that the middle spaces were up for grabs. I’d overfed the meter, displayed my ticket and yet when I staggered out of the supermarket, fingers garrotted and white with the volume of heavy bags I was carrying, my car had totally disappeared. I stood frozen in the space it had once occupied and wondered if this was how Alzheimer’s began. I reread the signs and then pointlessly crossed the road, as though by giving myself some distance it might cause it magically to reappear. Then I went into the drycleaners and asked a man who was a doppelganger for Borat if he knew what had happened to my car. He didn’t speak a syllable of English, but helpfully managed to mime. He mimed a clawed hand grabbing an imaginary object and holding it airborne for a few seconds before tossing it viciously in the direction of Christian Louboutin’s shop opposite. I thanked him, went back outside, dumped my shopping on the pavement and telephoned my husband.

‘My car’s been stolen,’ I announced.

‘Why?’ asked Johnnie.

‘Because it’s not here anymore. I parked it and now it’s gone.’

‘Maybe you parked it somewhere else,’ he suggested.

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