I think maybe Koornang Road in Carnegie doesn’t like my car. This is not some unfounded irrational fear of a particular street. Twice last weekend I had umm…. driving altercations there.
Last Friday night we piled into the car for a little shopping at Chadstone – Chaddy, as it’s known. Cruising down Koornang Road on the way there, a cyclist came from nowhere. Well, not from nowhere, from the left-hand footpath, straight onto the road.
If he’d been about a second later, I would have had a fair bit of trouble avoiding hitting him. He wasn’t looking where he was going, he wasn’t wearing a helmet, I don’t think he even had lights on the bike. What he did have was a kind of out-of-this-world grin on his face that made it obvious to me that he wasn’t thinking very much about his personal safety or my insurance premium, and certainly wasn’t paying any heed of my car horn.
Then on Sunday afternoon we were back in Carnegie, stopping off for a little shopping. I began to execute what was hopefully going to be one of my extremely skilful reverse parallel parks. I eased back into the space. A little more… a little more… slowly… a little more… Thud. Oops. Suddenly I sense the spirit of my driving instructor. He was probably nearby, I see him all the time.
I got out and looked. No damage to my car. No damage to the other one either, except that the front number plate appeared a little wobbly. But was it normally wobbly? I had no idea as to its normal state of wobbliness, and the driver of the car wasn’t present to make a statement on wobblitude. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I left a note on their windscreen, apologising and asking them to call me if they felt there was any damage to be accounted for. I put my sister’s name and number, and left. (Only kidding sis!)
No calls, so either the note got blown away, not noticed, or perhaps that number plate was always that wobbly.
