I remember once, in suburban Virginia, being offered a lift from Chilis to my hotel. On the other side of the modest restaurant parking lot. I was only in Chilis because it was the nearest source of beer-related beverages. I'm like seriously, I can see my room. And yes, I said it like a teenage girl. Wither under my contempt. And she's like You sure? Yes, I am sure I can walk 50 yards. Even American ones. I could do it in high heels and I'm 100% USDA approved boy counterbalanced with three pints of non-domestic draft. She wouldn't, alas, loan me her shoes. They won't fit, she declared. Like whatever, Cinderella. Actually, martinis might have been involved. I think I had to eat her car keys. Probably one of the better desserts I've had at Chilis.
It's amazing how easily the "drive everywhere" mindset can set in. When I lived in London I wouldn't drive anything less than about 5 miles because of the hassles of traffic, parking, traffic getting back home, hassles parking back at home, and the minor detail that having to drive imposed a tighter restriction on the amount of beer I could drink than I was entirely happy with. Yes, I'd drive the one mile to Homebase if I planned to buy something sufficiently big and heavy that I really couldn't get it home without the aid of an engine, although I did once borrow a flatbed trolley to haul a garden table and six chairs home, and duly returned it once I'd unloaded it (which seemed more responsible, even if more effort, than parking it with its brethren in the nearest river)
And then over here the infrastructure is so geared to the assumption that everybody drives everywhere that sometimes it can be difficult to actually walk somewhere. In the nearest small town trying to figure the best place to cross the road isn't a trivial exercise, but of course in the car you can just move from one car park the size of Bolivia to another at least a few seconds faster than you could walk the distance. Or at least that would be so if you could figure out where to cross the road.
But this is Surrey, and it's quite a spectacle. There's two strategies. One, favoured by Audi drivers, is simply to stop by the doors and wait for a space to become free. The other (BMWs, Mercedes, the godforsaken) is to orbit the car park like they're looking for a spot anywhere but they're not. They want that spot, right by the doors, and they'll orbit this car park until the sun sparks out if that is what it takes. Then they find a spot. The fun is only just starting. Because British car parks weren't built with cars the size of well-fed brontosaurus dumps in mind. Watching these idiots try to park in such spaces is the seventh funniest thing in the known universe. In. Out. In. A little to the left. No, no, to the left. It's like a Martin Amis description of sex.
My experience of Surrey was that unless you were spectacularly adept at climbing out of the sunroof most car parks were woefully undersized. It only took one car to be anything other than perfectly central within its allocated space before either the driver or the passenger was going to have to perform some gymnastics worthy of the Kama Sutra just to get out of the car. That's something I don't miss here, where parking spaces are about the size of Derbyshire and even if you're driving a super-sized SUV you can pretty much just swerve in the general direction of the space and throw the doors open before leaping out with the same
joie de vivre that actually finding a space in London generates but without the near certainty of dinging the sides of the car parked so close you can barely get a cigarette paper between them both. And instead of paying through the nose to park, round here the machines still take nickels. You don't get long for a nickel but when you can park for 15 minutes for the equivalent of 3p you really don't miss London parking arrangements. It's just as well the $1 coin isn't accepted because if it were your parking ticket would expire "sometime next week, maybe Thursday"
There's thread somewhere herein called 'urethral milking' which I was horribly, horribly disappointed to learn wasn't a sex thing I could silkily insert into casual conversation. Instead it's a practical technique for men to empty the more obscure avenues and cul-de-sacs of their willy wonkerish indoor plumping into a toilet bowl rather than their underpants. Anyway, any number of prostate problems can be cured by a hour or two in a NYC diner. There's enough weak coffee refills to ensure any man can probably piss hard enough to hit Pennsylvania. I hit the Liberty Bell from 24th and 3rd the other year.
Round here the problem isn't weak coffee, it's truly dismal coffee. Coffee so bad you wish it was weak on the basis that way you wouldn't be able to taste it. It's much like the way traditional American lagers are served ice cold because it's the only way you can tell them from urine. If the urinals are plumbed straight back into the keg they at least need to wait a while to chill it and carbonate it before serving it again. I'm convinced nobody would notice, as long as it was ice cold. But the coffee, coffee so bad you'd think it was a drain cleaner or something. Maybe it was in a previous life. It seems the dreaded filter machines are to blame. At least in a place that serves espresso you can blame the numbskull who makes it for not knowing their basket from their elbow, but when it's filter coffee once it's been brewed it sits there on the hotplate, unloved and unwanted, until someone takes pity on it and takes it home. It really is like the 15-year-old St Bernard with bladder control issues in the rescue home, except it doesn't taste as good. And then among the quagmire of truly awful coffee comes the odd gem - a place that serves coffee that goes beyond barely tolerable and is actually pleasant to drink. Remarkably, coffee from Sheetz (the gas station chain) is pleasant to drink. Admittedly with 463 different varieties of creamer, sweetener, milk and coffee there's bound to be a combination in there to suit anybody however finicky they might be, but there you go. Aside from that it seems to be the occasional diner that does good coffee at least some of the time. I wonder if there's a single barista who knows what they are doing in this area, and they work one day at a time. You have a nice coffee and, lulled into a false sense of security, go back for coffee. That's when you get the burnt abomination that tastes like a camel rider's jockstrap on a hot Friday afternoon.
Kosher. Gluten Free. Paleo. I see it now. I have a pitch for Fox. When Diets Collide.
That would be quite a show. You could air the same show on Fox and MSNBC so the two sides could argue over whether Bush or Obama was to blame for it.
