Parking is such sweet sorrow
A few weeks ago I was heading up to visit family, being driven by Dad because (a) the car's comfy and (b) it gives him something to do since he retired - turning off the motorway we decide to stop for lunch and see a pub up ahead (no drink-driving story here folks, Pop's drug of choice being regular insulin injections he hasn't touched the hard stuff since about 1967). However, there's a problem. In front of us are parked two cars blocking the lane ahead, the drivers leaning out of their windows and apparently having a nice chat. No sign of an accident or breakdown with either.

Dad toots the horn - carefully - to ask them to move (or at least to give them the opportunity to let us know if there's a problem that's preventing them getting out of the way of the traffic).

The driver of the right-hand car turns round, shouts something obscene at Dad and 'suggests' using illustrative hand gestures that he drive round them across the other carriageway to carry on.

It's a busy road and the maneouvre we'd have to make isn't practical or safe. Toot the horn again. This time the car ahead moves forward far enough for the driver to pull over to the left, still parking part way across the road. He gets out and walks towards our car as we start to move forward.

What pretty words he uses to imply again we should have driven round and left him and his mate to their conversation. As he's talking we continue to drive, since he's left us enough room to do what we needed to do - which is turn left onto the pub's empty car park which he and his equally dimwitted mate didn't have enough braincells to figure out would be a better option to stop than blocking the carriageway and expecting cars in both directions to wait or delay traffic on the other side of the road by driving all the flippin' way round!
(cisco, Wed 18 Oct 2006, 22:36, Reply)