I’m happy to have been a child of the seventies, but there are a few areas where I’m not sure it properly prepared me for adulthood. It vastly overstressed, for example, how prominent quicksand and rattle snakes were going to be in my future, while at the same time vastly underplaying one of the great scourges of modern life: finding somewhere to park.
That concern is, for example, why I got to the cinema so early to see The Force Awakens; and although in general terms our recent shopping trip to Exeter went off OK, there was a very tetchy half hour stuck in the queue for the car park. Anybody who’s parked in Exeter’s Guildhall car park will know that its entrance is up a steeply curved concrete slope, so there was an awful lot of irritable faffing about with handbrakes, biting points, and the like. (Anybody who HASN’T parked in Exeter’s Guildhall car park – don’t!)
Given what I now know, it may be that when Mum refers to one far-past Christmas shopping trip to Plymouth as ‘not the best of days’ it was due to a parking fracas between her and Dad – Dad, as a rule, being the designated driver throughout my seventies-based youth.
During particularly long journeys, I can remember sometimes stirring in the back seat just long enough to be reassured by his face caught in the glow of the streetlamps. But I also (only very occasionally of course!) recall him being a bit short-tempered while looking for somewhere to park.
Hopefully he won’t mind me saying that – or if he does, hopefully he’ll have got over it by Saturday afternoon when we’ll be driving down to see him and Mum, where there will be presents, plenty of food and, I would hope, ample parking.
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 