Jonny McCambridge: Parking problems – not in my back yard

It is a sunny afternoon, but with a breeze fresh enough to remind me that winter has not entirely loosened its harsh grip.
The offending car blocking the back gateThe offending car blocking the back gate
The offending car blocking the back gate

My son and I are in the back yard. It is the first time we have been out there together this year and there is a sense of release. He is playing a pretend game and I am playing at pretending that I am going to tidy the garden.

I am doing something inexact with the soil in the flowerbeds and refusing to acknowledge that I can hear him complaining about the bird poo on the seat of his blue swing.

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I’ve just nipped into the house to connect a plug when my son’s urgent shout brings me running back out.

‘Daddy! Daddy! Someone’s parked their car in our house!’

It takes me a few seconds to catch his meaning. He leads me to our back gate. I open the creaking wooden structure and there it is. A muddy, black car parked directly across the end of our driveway, blocking access to the rear yard.

We look about for a few minutes, thinking possibly that someone is visiting us or delivering a package to our house. But nobody can be found, and the conclusion seems clear. The driver has blocked our gate while he or she has gone to carry out whatever their business is in our estate.

We walk around the car. I take a few photos to make a point. My son is snapping at my heels, buzzing agitatedly.

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‘Daddy, they can’t park there! This is our house! Call the police!’

I’ve seen my share of residential parking disputes over the years. I had a neighbour once who, if anyone dared to park on the pavement in front of his terraced house, would emerge and roar about how long he had lived on this street and how he had earned the right to park outside his own home.

I had a friend with neighbours who, if they determined that a car had parked too close to their front door, would surround that car front and back with their own two vehicles in a pincer movement, making it difficult for the offending driver to drive away. It was a crude way of making a point.

I once covered a court case of a man who has put nails under the tyres of cars that parked on the footpath at the end of his garden.

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I’m aware of another person who leaves sarcastic notes on the windscreens of cars which park anywhere near the bottom of her driveway.

I’ve always tried not to get involved in such matters, determined, as ever, to see both sides of the argument. After all, I have reasoned, society is struggling to deal with climate change and parts of Europe are suffering terribly from war, so it makes no sense to get heated over something as trivial as inconsiderate parking. That’s what I tell myself.

But now here I am, feeling my mood darken because a car has blocked my driveway. I argue internally that this is different, this car is actually on my land, blocking an entrance route.

I’ve every right to bristle at the trespass. I tell myself that I’d love to give the driver a stern lecture and a poisonous glare, if only I wasn’t so profoundly petrified at the prospect of human confrontation.

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And then something becomes obvious to me. My son is angry. In fact, he is displaying more anger and defiance than I am.

I think I know what’s happening here. He’s aping my behaviour, doing what he thinks I’ll do, and what he thinks I want him to do. But he’s so young and I don’t want him to be offended by anything on this sunny afternoon, even if my instinct is telling me that I’ve every right to be personally annoyed.

So, I sit on the swing with the bird poo and I ask him why he’s angry. He tells me it’s because of the car which has parked on our land. He makes the point that the tyres of the car are on the stones that distinguish our plot from the road outside.

Which is true. But it’s also true that I never use the back gate for access. The car, while parked inconsiderately, is causing us no material harm and perhaps it’s not worth getting steamed about.

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I try to explain this to my son, telling him that we’ve no way of knowing why that car has parked there; perhaps the driver had an emergency or did not recognise it as an entrance point.

Or perhaps, I suggest, he or she did it deliberately and the offender always makes a point of parking in the most antagonistic fashion they can manage. We have no way of controlling the behaviour of others, just of ourselves. My son looks confusedly at me before he runs off to play another game.

It’s about an hour later and I’m considering what to do with the old Christmas tree which has been lying neglected in the garden since the end of the holidays. My son is now playing indoors, and I begin to clear his toys off the grass. I’ve left the back gate open, perhaps as a way of making a point.

Then I hear the crunch of heavy footprints on stones nearby. A car door opens, and an engine reluctantly growls into life.

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I stand tall and, just for a moment, consider that I should go and talk to the driver. Maybe we’d have a good yarn about it. Maybe he or she would apologise. I’d say it’s fine and we’d have a shared laugh at the misunderstanding.

But then maybe the driver would get defensive and crabby and some relationship with a neighbour would be poisoned. I’d have made my point, but to what benefit?

As I said earlier, I’m a coward by instinct. I continue moving the toys around and watch the car drive away in the narrow cracks between the slats of my old garden fence.

There are more clouds in the sky than earlier, and I feel the cool breeze on my forearms even more keenly now. I notice that the persistent gusts are rustling the leaves at the end of the thin branches of the tall trees at the far end of the garden.

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I see now that the daffodils are beginning to come through, the brilliant yellow petals tentatively showing their faces to the world. They are the first blooms that I have seen this year in our garden.

I am fascinated every year by the daffodils. I didn’t plant them. I don’t tend to them or look after them. I give them no care. Yet, at the beginning of every spring they emerge nonetheless in my back yard.

It is getting too cold now. I close the back gate and go inside the house.

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