Features

It's very hard to park and be polite. In fact, it's very hard to even talk about parking and be polite, as I noticed recently watching a fantastically bad-tempered piece of parking in London, where the car mounted the pavement.

See, that sounds rude. Let's say the driver came up the kerb unexpectedly. No, that's worse actually. Anyway, the car was being parked, and one minute it was on the road and the next it was on the pavement.

As all this mounting and coming up kerbs suggests parking is essentially about sex, which is why men lose their tempers when they do it and women get bored half way through the act.

Actually, it's about having sex in public, as a TV ad in the Seventies made by the Ministry of Something or the Department of Whatever made clear.

It showed a man who was so inept at pulling his vehicle successfully up against the pavement's edge that crowds would gather to watch. This being the Seventies, all the women were dressed like Mary Whitehouse and the men like the bass player from Sweet.

But it all ended well because this was also Britain during the sexual revolution and everyone felt much happier about doing in it front of people in the street. Even people that looked like Mary Whitehouse and the bass player from Sweet.

Thirty years later, parking is still about getting things in holes very publicly, but it is a much more fraught affair because we now live in an age of safe sex, Viagra, internet porn and dogging (why does it only happen in car parks?).

The answer is to admit parking is like the sex and behave accordingly. So never let yourself be rushed into it and only do it with people you love in the context of a stable and long-term relationship.

And always undo your belt first.