Friday, March 14, 2008

Car watching

If you've been paying attention, and you should be as they'll be an exam after, you'll know my car broke down on Tuesday night. Now it's happened before and I've talked about it with friends, but when mentioning a key-point here it reminded me of some of the events around me.

The key-point in question was that so far I've been lucky enough to break-down in areas that I can either pull-in off the road or at the least get out of the majority of the lane to let traffic past. What I was going to follow the comment with was 'despite the people around me'.

So I'm parked just behind the marked-out bus-stop in a parking space, behind me are the disabled bays. It's a two-lane one-way road with a pedestrian crossing just the other side of the bus-stop then a stupid little island.

Car-watching -

There are three cars already parked in the other lane opposite the bus-stop.

A tall car parks behind me in the disabled section, two guys get out and saunter across the road and up right into High Street

A car swerves onto the bus-stop in front of me and stops abruptly, waits then accelerates sharply into the other lane and off right into High Street.

A long bus pulls in and I hold my breath as it angles in past me and the cars opposite.

Car pulls in in front of the ones in the opposite lane over the zigzag markings of the pedestrian crossing.

Guys come back and leave in the car behind me.

Car comes in and parks behind all the other in the other lane directly opposite me.

Really hold my breath as another long bus angles past me. He couldn't swing out or swing in so he's angled and none of the other cars can get past. passengers get on and off and he then drives off.

Low van pulls in behind me, guy gets out with what looks like a toolkit and vanishes up High Street.

Range Rover type car tries to parallel park between two of the cars in the other lane against the flow of traffic, the parked car behind that point now tries to pull out past him into traffic.

A car pulls in front of the bus stop over the zig-zags and stops... hazard lights go on... then off.

Long bus tries to pull in, again sticks out at an angle because he can neither swing around nor pull forward... leaves.

Passenger alights from parked car and heads left down Bridge Street, car pulls off into High Street.

Car directly opposite me leaves

Another car moves into the space before it

I notice how damn dark it is up the left-side of York Street

I start to go mad as the wind causes the two hanging signs to creak just out of sync with each other.

I wonder how it is that I can't find a radio station that's playing any music I like, and how come the same new song from Duffy gets repeated over three different stations.

Okay, other then how my dumb memory works, the point was there's an entire car-park down New Street opposite where I'm parked, High Street has an entire length of car-bays, and for most of it's length the road I'm parked in has a set of car-bays and the bottom end of it on the opposite side was pretty much clear. And yet everyone was still jostling for position in an area they shouldn't really be parked in just because it's closer to the takeaways.

Oh and yay I've just got my car back with a new clutch cable and a lubricated release arm, which sounds kind of kinky.

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