Standing Room | 18 April 2009

It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself.

It’s at trying times like these that my latent inner-bimbo gene struggles to reassert itself. Sod equal rights, sod women’s lib and to hell with emancipation. When my car mysteriously vanished outside Waitrose last Friday night I was immediately engulfed by a pathetically primal desire to play the role of helpless victim. I’d parked in good faith — albeit in a bay that had not one, but two large suspension notices; I’d carefully read both signs and deduced that the middle spaces were up for grabs. I’d overfed the meter, displayed my ticket and yet when I staggered out of the supermarket, fingers garrotted and white with the volume of heavy bags I was carrying, my car had totally disappeared. I stood frozen in the space it had once occupied and wondered if this was how Alzheimer’s began.