Some of you reading will know my mother is diabetic and has lots of other things going on, as well as the arthritis and now dementia taking hold.
My car has been playing up this week. Sometimes the central locking works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Today, I broke the only physical key lock on the car, when I tried to force it open.
The kidlets sniggered and snuffled on the driveway, yelling things like ‘I’m telling dad on you,’ and singing ‘she’s a key breaker, you won’t get in no more, no more, no more, no more.’
Yeah, I know, stupido to try and force it!
Anyway, I can’t just leave it unlocked as it has a safety mechanism whereby if you leave the car alone for over five minutes with no key in the ignition, it auto locks! It can’t be turned off.
It finally decided to work tonight, so I took my mother round to our local shop to get some bits and bobs. From there, it went downhill.
We parked in one of the two empty disabled spaces. Quite rightly as the badge was displayed and she sat in the passenger seat.
The problem was, that when I opened my door and hopped out, middler did the same behind me.
At which point, I heard an extremely loud voice that caught my attention just in time to see a well dressed gentleman raise his hand and shout to someone else walking to the shop door. He was making it clear that the spaces were meant for disabled people only and implying I was parked where I shouldn’t be.
I was meant to hear that.
He hadn’t seen my mum struggle to get out of the passenger door.
He’d seen me and jumped on his high hobby horse. The hackles rose on the back of my neck, but I pushed down the anger. My mum doesn’t like conflict of any kind.
Then, middler, who never forgets a face, pointed madly at a man standing at the checkout. I wouldn’t have recognised him as the two men who entered looked similar, and I had a mother to help out.
My feet took up a life of their own, and I walked to where he was leaving the checkouts, asking him if he was the man who made the snarky comment about the disabled space.
He smirked and said, yes, they were meant for disabled people. At which point, I said my piece about being entitled to park there as the car is displaying the correct badge and the disabled person was doing her shopping at the back of the shop. I told him to stop making snarky comments that I was meant to hear.
Middler was sniggering up his sleeve at this point as I rose to be a short term hero in his eyes.
The snarky commenter’s sneer told me he didn’t believe me. Whatever his bad mood was about tonight, I suspect I made it worse. It’s his family I feel sorry for.
Imagine having to live with that!
