It's a beautiful afternoon in a beautiful part of the world and yet, as you stroll around the car park, you find dozens of people sunbathing in their budgie-smugglers or bikinis, and dozens of others sitting around chatting and eating their picnics all of whom don't seem to have moved more than six feet since they parked the car...
We're a funny lot, the British, marking out our territory and protecting it, and seeming to have very little in the way of a sense of adventure when it comes to venturing forth despite, our nation's long, sometimes disgraceful and perhaps undistinguished history of venturing out into the world and planting our flags in strange lands and claiming them for ourselves.
Is it about our fear of car break-ins...?
Or just laziness...?
Or do we just need to bask in the shelter and comfort of something familiar, our own little bit of transportable home that the nearby car seems to represent...?
Because there are lovely spots just a short hop and a skip away which would serve the purpose of having a picnic or a sunbathe just as well, most with quite relaxing, breath-taking and spectacular views, most of which give you far less exposure to carbon monoxide, and which have far fewer risks of a distracted motorist driving over your foot...
But, instead of going over and looking at the beautiful scenery, the presence of which was probably at least in part why that destination was chosen in the first place, a sea of boxy steel becomes the vista of choice...
Still, if you want to go all that way and then sit or lie down in a car park all afternoon, I suppose that's up to you. People will do what people will do, and the strange antics of other people will just have to continue to confuse me as I trudge along through my own bamboozling existence.
And it's not just the picnickers or the sunbathers, either. Despite the fact that there are cars coming and going all the time, some of which have drivers who are new to the area or distracted by looking for a clear spot to park in, some people still use this field as a playground, kicking footballs around, throwing Frisbees and generally doing the kind of playing in traffic that would not be advisable in any more urban car park.
This kind of "fun" of course, I wouldn't normally have noticed, but then I had the "football moment..."
We were idly strolling across the car park towards the next tea shop, chunnering busily to ourselves about the number of people not venturing beyond the car park and unfortunately displaying their budgie-smugglers to the world at large when we passed quite some small distance away from a father and son who had set up some "jumpers for goalposts" and were having a kick about.
Unfortunately, and perhaps almost inevitably, there was what I believe is known as a "mis-kick" and the football came rolling along the ground straight towards us.
Now, I must point out that I have very little skill in the footballing department. My main footballing injury sustained at school came when I was knocking the mud off my boots by bashing them against a wall and the footballing teacher was playing "wall-ee" and kicked a football right at my head, bashing it hard enough on the one side to make the other side whack into the wall next to it and, whilst this was a good lesson in Newtonian Physics, it did little to endear the sport itself to me and a few years of spectacular uselessness, being the last picked to make up sides, and trying to avoid the ball as much as possible followed.
For a moment I stared at the ball as it came towards me, thinking "Why me?" and swiftly realising that I would be expected to return the ball to the players about thirty feet away for whom fetching it themselves suddenly seemed far too much trouble.
So, I approached the ball with a certain amount of trepidation and the memories of all those youthful years of being mocked for my pointless aerial antics of trying to stop one of these things in mid-air in my mind, and kicked it back to them...
Reader, it went in a straight line and, furthermore, that straight line was precisely the direction it was supposed to be going in...!
The father waved back in gratitude and we moved on, although I had slightly more of a spring in my step than I had only a few moments before, and I also completely failed to trip over any bikini-clad sunbathers despite it now being a much larger risk, given their amount of ground cover and the fact that my head was momentarily in the clouds...
Or just laziness...?
Or do we just need to bask in the shelter and comfort of something familiar, our own little bit of transportable home that the nearby car seems to represent...?
Because there are lovely spots just a short hop and a skip away which would serve the purpose of having a picnic or a sunbathe just as well, most with quite relaxing, breath-taking and spectacular views, most of which give you far less exposure to carbon monoxide, and which have far fewer risks of a distracted motorist driving over your foot...
But, instead of going over and looking at the beautiful scenery, the presence of which was probably at least in part why that destination was chosen in the first place, a sea of boxy steel becomes the vista of choice...
Still, if you want to go all that way and then sit or lie down in a car park all afternoon, I suppose that's up to you. People will do what people will do, and the strange antics of other people will just have to continue to confuse me as I trudge along through my own bamboozling existence.
And it's not just the picnickers or the sunbathers, either. Despite the fact that there are cars coming and going all the time, some of which have drivers who are new to the area or distracted by looking for a clear spot to park in, some people still use this field as a playground, kicking footballs around, throwing Frisbees and generally doing the kind of playing in traffic that would not be advisable in any more urban car park.
This kind of "fun" of course, I wouldn't normally have noticed, but then I had the "football moment..."
We were idly strolling across the car park towards the next tea shop, chunnering busily to ourselves about the number of people not venturing beyond the car park and unfortunately displaying their budgie-smugglers to the world at large when we passed quite some small distance away from a father and son who had set up some "jumpers for goalposts" and were having a kick about.
Unfortunately, and perhaps almost inevitably, there was what I believe is known as a "mis-kick" and the football came rolling along the ground straight towards us.
Now, I must point out that I have very little skill in the footballing department. My main footballing injury sustained at school came when I was knocking the mud off my boots by bashing them against a wall and the footballing teacher was playing "wall-ee" and kicked a football right at my head, bashing it hard enough on the one side to make the other side whack into the wall next to it and, whilst this was a good lesson in Newtonian Physics, it did little to endear the sport itself to me and a few years of spectacular uselessness, being the last picked to make up sides, and trying to avoid the ball as much as possible followed.
For a moment I stared at the ball as it came towards me, thinking "Why me?" and swiftly realising that I would be expected to return the ball to the players about thirty feet away for whom fetching it themselves suddenly seemed far too much trouble.
So, I approached the ball with a certain amount of trepidation and the memories of all those youthful years of being mocked for my pointless aerial antics of trying to stop one of these things in mid-air in my mind, and kicked it back to them...
Reader, it went in a straight line and, furthermore, that straight line was precisely the direction it was supposed to be going in...!
The father waved back in gratitude and we moved on, although I had slightly more of a spring in my step than I had only a few moments before, and I also completely failed to trip over any bikini-clad sunbathers despite it now being a much larger risk, given their amount of ground cover and the fact that my head was momentarily in the clouds...
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