Well, half of it happened. A woman in her thirties did say the exact words I have recorded as her lines below. But I did not respond in anything like the detail that I am suggesting, as there wasn't time and I couldn't be bothered. Instead I responded by sighing gently (I had not yet brushed my teeth that morning and so this was probably quite unpleasant for her) and waiting for her to go away. I was also rather hungover, so I allowed my eyes to close very gradually as she spoke. I find that this often infuriates people who are trying to tell me off, with its coded message that they are sending me to sleep. It is important to remain calm during the process of parking large vehicles in busy car parks, and if passive aggressive behaviour is the only means of doing so, that is how it must be.
If you and a friend are reading this script out loud, it is important that the character of the WOMAN has a Yorkshire accent and a tone of belligerent sarcasm. The character of ME should be voiced with friendly good humour in received pronunciation. Think Stephen Fry.
WOMAN: Can I just point something out? Why are you trying to park a massive great car in a tiny little space when there are two big spaces just over there?
ME: Thank you for your valued contribution. While I'm a little disappointed that you did not await my consent for you to point something out, and you then, in fact, went on to ask a second question rather than make an observation, as you had requested permission to do, you have successfully brought me to reconsider my choice of a parking space.
This is not, however, a 'massive great car,' it is a compact motorhome. It fits fairly easily in a space designed for a conventional motorcar, so long as it is able to overhang a verge or other similar unused space at the back. This has previously caused us small problems in itself - first in Norfolk, where the rear end of the van blocked a pavement running around the edge of a much larger and emptier Waitrose car park than the one in which we now converse, that I simply could not have anticipated anybody wanting to use, until a sour-faced elderly man made a point of walking right up to the van and taking a U-shaped detour around it while shaking his head slowly before returning to the pavement and heading toward even more completely empty space.
A few weeks later, in Teignmouth, Devon, we parked in a car park just as busy as this one today. There was a 'festival' at The Ship Inn that seemed to consist of a band dragging their sorry musical arses through some poorly-remembered Clash covers while scores of pissed-up Brummies made a good seaside town look crap. This was still the summer holidays, of course, and there were several motorhomes in the car park, most of which were considerably larger than ours, some of them parked sideways across three or even four car spaces. Without the opportunity to overhang a verge, we had found a central space with a small car parked in the one behind it, in such a way as to leave lots of room for us to park our van. When the already unhappy-looking family returned, they made a point of bending down closely to look at the six-inch gap between the rears of our respective vehicles as if they thought they might see some evidence of damage there, or they were concerned that they could not open their boot. Most of the family then got into the car (they didn't have anything to put in the boot) while the Dad (whom I suspect may have been serving a driving ban at the time) seemed intent on standing at the rear of the vehicle to give his partner hand signals for how to drive forwards, directly away from our van. Once he had got back in, the mother of the family drove around to the front of the van and stopped to glare at me for a moment or two before finally driving away, her son grinning out of the back window as if he had particularly enjoyed something his mother had had to say about me - 'stupid beardy bastard' or 'smelly fucking hippie,' perhaps.
It was at this moment that I began to think of the busy car park as the perfect analogy for an overpopulated island. Broken Britain in microcosm, with people demonstrating a territorial obsessiveness over rectangular spaces of asphalt on which they have paid a couple of pounds' rent. I've parked in another one almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day, since, never once hitting anything, never once protruding from the marked bay, and never once failing to observe that England is a lot like one big shitty car park.
But I digress. The 'tiny little space' to which you are referring is no larger or smaller than either one of the 'two big spaces' you have indicated 'over there,' but it would be greedy and unnecessary for me to take up more than one space, and the man might give me a ticket. Also, there is a large and dense-looking shrub very close to the back of those two spaces, and if I try and squeeze up against it I may damage it, or even worse, my back window. I shall not go into the details of how much these parts cost to replace. The 'tiny little space' which happens to be directly next to your car has no such shrub, and, in short, would be much better for me to park my vehicle in.
WOMAN: I mean, should you not be looking for a better place to park a great big thing like this? D'you know you nearly took the front end off my car just then, and I've got somebody coming in a minute and they're not going to be able to get in.
ME: I did not 'nearly take the front end off your car,' because I did not touch your car. If it were possible that I could remove a substantial but ill-defined part of your car by driving very close to it, this would have to mean that your car was extremely unsafe. I would advise you to leave it where it is and walk home.
Further, I have to say I doubt that you are really worried that I might damage your car, as you would clearly have a whale of a time if I did. You're just unhappy that I am intruding upon the borders of your personal space. You'd be exactly the same if I were five stone heavier and attempted to sit next to you on the tube, my love handles wedged up on top of the arm rests.
WOMAN: You should park somewhere else. It's blatantly obvious, really.
ME: What is blatantly obvious is that you are accustomed to telling people what to do. Perhaps you are a primary school teacher (you certainly look like one) but I don't think you would be sat in your car in a Waitrose car park at eleven-fifteen on a Friday morning in term time if you were. It is also blatantly obvious that if you are waiting for somebody to come and join you in your car, it would be possible for you to pull out of the space and stop for a moment in order for them to be able to open your passenger door easily. But you're not prepared to do that, and you haven't been listening to my reasoning because I haven't really said any of these things to you, have I?
(Starwipe back into reality. ME shrugs, sighs, mutters something about 'thanks for pointing that out,' and sets about the murder of a shrub with 3.5 tons of van.)
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