Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [24]
Undeterred, however, paranormalparking's marketing boss Steve Waller has adopted the mantle of an opium-addled Victorian novelist. 'Looking for inspiration while working late in the office I have taken a walk around the compound and twice caught the fleeting impression of people talking,' he writes. 'But heard as if through a wall.' It may be a piece of undigested airline food etc. At least he resisted the urge to say it was a dark and stormy night.
Now PD James, she's one who could summon the dead hand of mortal dread with a story about a haunted dolls' house or whatever. And Dickens recognised that the lonely signalman, marooned in his box, deep in a damp cutting and with nought but a chipped tin mug and the fevered workings of his consumptive imagination for company, was simply asking for a visitation from the other world.
But car parks just aren't scary. The bloke in charge usually has a modern hut with a telly, a telephone, a radiator and tea- and coffee-making facilities. He's hardly a soul in torment, and if he has an idle moment he will probably watch a repeat of Top Gear rather than allow his mind to dwell on aspects of the occult.
Mind you, to be fair, if I found myself in purplepark-ing's lot late at night and I came upon the marketing director wandering around, wearing the chains he forged in life, and trying to dream up new promotional initiatives for what is, when all's said and done, just a car park, I might be slightly disturbed.
Late last night I rang purpleparking's office to see if there was Anybody There, and to ask if there was any substance to this story, or if it was just a desperate ploy to hoodwink unsuspecting motoring columnists in quality broadsheet newspapers. I was assured by a voice, rising as if from the tomb, that the unexplained events at their Southall operation were a very serious business.
Well, I'm sorry, but I just don't believe in PR. The simple fact is that the car and its related service industries have never, to my knowledge, yielded a decent ghost story. There have been phantom ships, ghost trains, aerial carriages hauled by demented skeletal horses. But a quick perusal of my gazetteer of British hauntings has revealed not a single apparitional Austin Seven with a headless driver pulling noiselessly into a business car park to the abject terror of its attendants.
The car park is too new, too temporal and just too mundane to invoke the spirit world, real or imagined. The worst you're likely to confront is the spectre of an expired credit card at the exit barrier.
I'M GAY, BUT NOT THAT GAY
This weekend, I've come out. Sorry to hit you with it so bluntly, but there really is no easy way to admit to being gay even in this era of rampant inclusiveness.
I realise, too, that no one really wants to read a lot of cloying self-analysis from someone who can't accept, in the post-Wilde era, that it's of no real interest to anyone. No – I mention it simply because there is an important message for the modern motorist within all this.
I also wish to make it absolutely bloody clear, right here in paragraph three, that I'm not really gay at all, and that I've simply been coerced by circumstance into a temporary gay lifestyle experience. On the other hand, I'm forced to admit that there's a lot to be said for it.
It all began on Friday afternoon when, with a tra-la-la, Woman departed the May household to spend a weekend in Italy with her posh mates. Nothing too debilitating about that. Not being one of these useless modern men, I can cook, clean, shop and make my own entertainment.
But then my mate Colin rang to say his wife had left him for the weekend as well. Regular readers may remember Colin is a bloke who never puts spanners