I was conducting some surveys of houses all over the South East of England, and became fascinated by how some people regarded "their parking space" outside their houses. It was a completely new phenomenon to me. One day, I parked the van on a very quiet residential street in Harpenden and went to work in the adjacent house. The road was narrow, but there were plenty of cars parked and there was still lots of room for vehicles to pass. Twenty minutes later, the householder called me down from the loft and asked me to move my van. The person who lived in the house opposite had just parked his car directly opposite my van, thereby blocking the road, even though he could have parked 10 yards down the road without causing a problem. "I'm sorry, but he does like to park outside his house" the person I was visiting told me.
Having moved the van and completed the job, I couldn't help scrawling a note and leaving it under his wiper blade, telling the sad git to get some kind of a life. It wasn't quite as polite as that though.
