"They've Paved Paradise and Put up a Parking Lot"

Today

There seems to be some kind of law that, having driven past your destination, finding there are no parking spaces, you pay for an hour's parking when you are unlikely to be more than ten minutes and walk back to find that in your absence an enormous parking space has become available right outside.

This happened to me in Wells today and started a train of thought about how we attach significance to the most random occurences.

In My Day

When we lived at Montfort Close, in 1984, one of our neighbours, was an exceedingly large lady named Kate with a daughter about the same age as Becky. Naturally, we became friendly and for a while saw a lot of each other.

She was a very deeply religious person, regularly attending church. Her view of God was personal to an absurd degree and we soon coined a name for this: "The God of the parking space". She seemed genuinely to believe that if she drove into Eastbourne on a crowded Saturday afternoon and prayed very hard, that God would find her a parking space. How this would work if there were more people praying for a space that there were spaces available, was never made clear. Pretty harmless, you might say, but Kate coupled this with a tendency to talk about black South African natives in a tone of disgust as "Kaffirs"  and thought nothing of trying cruelly to drive a wedge between Liz and Becky.

Then there was a friend of Paul's Mother who, faced with uncertainty about her accommodation, said that God had visited her and told her to build a loft conversion, which I guess is something anyone could work out with a modicum of common sense.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, the jury's out on whether there's a god or not, but a belief in a God who deals in parking spaces and loft extensions, while ignoring bigger issues such as cruelty or racial discrimination,  smacks more of stone-age paganism than well-grounded spiritual understanding.

Although it might be interesting to discover if there is a statistical correlation between their belief and success at parking.