SOME BLOKE

"'Scuse me mate, you can't park there," cried a large lady.

I turned back to my car.  She was on the phone. "Yeah sorry about that, some bloke just parked outside Mum's," she bellowed at her smartphone. I looked at my car. It wasn't in front of anyone's drive; the only car that wouldn't have been able to get out had grass growing through the wheel arches and was rusting under a piece of tarpaulin; I doubted very much that this lady's mum, or in fact, anyone's mum, would be going anywhere in it. I checked the lamp-posts for indications of parking restrictions. Nothing: no yellow lines, no cones, no dropped curb, no signs that I was talking to a plain-clothes traffic warden... in fact, there was no obvious reason why I couldn't park there, at all!

She was still on the phone. I really wanted to ask her why I couldn't park. I wanted to hear her reasons, I wanted to hash it out logically and elucidate the lack of evidence, reasoning my case like a passionate Perry Mason, pointing out that there was frankly no legal or physical obligation for me to move my car at all... and until there was it would very much be staying there.

Alas, I am just 'some bloke' - an anonymous randomer with no telepathic ability to figure out the difference between a suitable car parking space and the personal concrete of a large lady's mum. I didn't say anything. I got in the car, drove off down the road and parked it somewhere else.

I don't know how I feel about being 'some bloke'. I mean I understand what she meant - I had encroached upon her space and so she had firmly enforced the rules of her world upon me. Presumably she believes that if someone breaks your rules, you have the right to be impolitely offended and to reply just as impolitely. While I think this is a foolish doorway to many arguments, I can see that she would not have considered it inappropriate at all.

What was interesting to me though was that for the first time in a long time, I had become an extra in the story of my own life. I didn't like it very much. I'm way too used to being the main character. In her world, I was just 'some bloke' who had to move his car so that the unfolding plot (with her as the heroine) could continue. Some bloke is insignificant to this story: a nuisance, a worthless annoyance who gets in the way of the fairy tale, whom she will shout at once in the street on a sunny September afternoon, but then never care about or see again.

It occurs to me that a lot of conflicts arise because of our fierce commitment to our own stories. I think we all consider ourselves to be the main character - the star surrounded by the spinning planets and moons which make up the rest of our glowing solar systems. As we grow older we realise that sometimes we get our own way, but a lot of the time we don't - sometimes our reasons for this are right, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes we matter to other people... and guess what, sometimes we really don't. Sometimes our solar system collides with someone else's and things get very messed up. If we fail to empathise with our antagonists, a conflict will probably spill out and escalate.

I could quite easily have ended up with a car with smashed windows or an unpleasant altercation in the street. She could quite easily have felt humiliated and angry, calling the police or worse, other large ladies, to shout me down.

With all that in mind, I resolved to do a little post-event empathy myself and started reasoning out how things might work in her solar system. Empathy always asks 'What if?'... What if, for example, her Mum had had a fall and they were actually waiting for an ambulance? It might explain her terseness. What if they were about to have a big party with lots of frail and elderly guests who needed to park close to the house? What if her Mum just liked to see out of her front window and didn't like looking at cars?

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there could be loads of reasons why my grumpy attitude at having to move my car a few yards down the road may have been misplaced. In my world, my plot had been interrupted by a lady telling me that I couldn't do something, but failing to tell me why. In hers, the collision of solar systems had led to her correcting a situation forcefully to allow life to continue.

I locked up the car up and walked back past the house. She was still on the phone, presumably arranging more of her world to align with her story. She didn't see me smile at her and she didn't say thank you. It's OK though I think because empathy allows me to understand more of her world than my own world normally permits. Ah but what would I know? I'm just 'some bloke'.