When I write about real-life incidents here, it's nice to be told that I've taken something very mundane and blown it up into an entertaining story. I'm beginning to wonder, though, if this isn't through any actual writing ability but because these things really do seem bigger than they should to me, through nervous stress that's been building up over the last twenty-six years.

I had another parking ticket yesterday - I had noticed the car marked "Parking Officer" hovering around the car park I use for work, but didn't see the slip of paper half-melted in the rain at the bottom of the windscreen until I made to turn right out of it. They mark it with a red strip on the front addressing you as "TO VIOLATOR:" as if you've just exposed yourself, and this one said that I had been in a restricted area. Being specifically allowed to park in the space that I was in, I zoomed back to my space and caught the car just before it moved off. The woman inside acted like a bit of a miserable old piano teacher when I presented her with the ticket, asking me where my permit was and where it was meant to be displayed. The answers are on the back and front, respectively, but no instructions to this effect had been provided, and as I park with the back of the car facing outwards I thought it more logical to put it on the back window rather than make the traffic wardens stumble through the hedges when checking them - but if they prefer to do that then I have no argument. She became a lot nicer when she realized I was a new driver and had an accent, though, took the ticket back, and I've peeled the permit off and put it on the windscreen to prevent any more potential bat attacks in the future.

I'm not used to this compared to the situation where I lived in Scotland, where we've got plenty of room and so you could just pull over and leave your car where you felt like it, as long as it wasn't in anyone's immediate trajectory. It also means, of course, that I've had 100% of parking tickets rescinded in my entire time as a driver here - let's start as I mean to go on.

Also, I'd like it known that if you're whipping cream without holding the bowl, and it tilts even slightly when the electric whisk impacts the side, it then paints the most wonderful clear stripes across everything and everyone in the vicinity. That was a much better problem.