That poor woman in Belfast.
Never mind parallel parking, she's invented a whole new category – viral parking. Thanks to the students who filmed her hapless attempts to park – and added insult to injury by carrying on an increasingly excited running commentary as they watched – she has now reversed across more computer screens around the world than the average Angry Bird.
All it needed was for her to have a retriever called Fenton with her and the world could have been hers.
Let's hope she can find a way to monetise her humiliation.
Because humiliation is what it is really. It's trial by YouTube. You can't make a mistake in public these days without someone filming you and finding yourself uploaded.
Let's admit it, parallel parking is hard. If it was easy, evolution would surely have had us walking backwards all the time, possibly with an in-built voice saying: "Warning. Human reversing. Warning. Human reversing."
In fact, there are days when all parking is hard. Be honest – are your hubcaps smooth or do they resemble a cheese grater? What is the point of kerbstones if you can't grind the wheels against them so you know you're close enough?
The history of parking is littered with tragedy. Look at Richard III. He famously died trying while circling Grey Friars car park in Leicester city centre, waiting for someone to leave. "A place! A place! My kingdom for a place!" Poor man, his back was horribly deformed when they found him, an injury almost certainly sustained as he tried to reverse into his favourite spot, bay 217 on Basement Level B. He always chose this one because it was easier to wheel the trolley straight out from Sainsbury's. When his remains were exhumed last year a perfectly preserved parking ticket was found in his hand, the tragedy being that it still had time on it ("Now is the winter of our disused 10 minutes").
So don't be too harsh on the Mr Beans of the parking world. We all have those days when our spatial awareness seems to leave us. We need to find some universal truth in the nightmare of parallel parking. Perhaps it is that we always have more room than we think (in all areas of our life perhaps) and that if the result isn't exactly symmetrical – the car, the things in our house – does it really matter in the great scheme of things?
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