Filthy Lies and Our Unwillingness to be Saved

This is a post that will surely apply to every single human animal who has ever driven a car.

You know you have done it – pitched up in your fancy Aston Martin, turned off the engine, hopped out for a oily burger and a flat warm beer, only to return to your automotive dreamboat to find it assailed, nay abused, by the very presence of a yellow plastic bag. You know what it means; you know what will be asked of you; you know how you should react, being a normal sane reasonable human animal.

Yet we don’t react like that. Despite parking our beautiful vehicle on the double yellow decorative adornments on the edge of the road, and convincing ourselves that it won’t matter because we are only stopping for a moment and a parking revenue gatherer isn’t evident within miles, we react in a strange way.

We regress into spoilt brats and have a road-side paddy. Our proverbial toys are cast some distance from our proverbial perambulator and we stomp our Pierre Cardin loafers into the pavement. How dare they place this yellow baggy on my car? How very dare they? ‘Nazis’ you will claim; commission earners you will venture; lower than a snake’s belly you will label. How dare they place a parking ticket on our perfectly illegally parked motor. The indignity. The presumption.  Given a moment or two more and we are quite convinced that it is personal and the warden in question was just waiting for you to park your car right there, illegally. In a little van, like a light-deprived Gollum. The bastards.

And, dear reader, it does not end there. Consider how easily 408.23 tonnes of tin, cables and kerosene would fall out of the sky given half a chance – if, say, its means of forward propulsion, the means by which its lift and drag ratios are expedited, failed to expedite one sunny afternoon. I speak of course about a hapless Boeing 747 flying into an ash cloud that could well choke its engines and the resultant crash causing its occupants to hit the ground like a dart. Those silly old sausages who are ‘in charge’  thought for a moment that it might be better not to fly the gravity defying monsters and that you might just have to wait to fly. How unreasonable; how bureaucratic; how petty; health and safety gone mad – those are our calls. Because, of course, we know better don’t we. When we did our Times Tables and Socatoas at school all those years ago, we suddenly and by osmosis became experts in aeronautical risk and the critical mass weight of ash intake into the air intake or yer standard Pratt & Whitney JT9D high by-pass Turbofan before it conks out and causes its concomitant humanity to be rendered into passata.

Bottom line – we hate to be wrong, corrected, caught out, have our plans altered or anything that shifts the horizon an iota. Not only do we not like it, but we become petulant and daft about it too. No wonder the gospel message suffers in the modern world. ‘Nuff said.