Fiddling around on a Sunday

I love having my car back. After all 40 days and 40 nights amounts to Lent as Laura pointed out yesterday.

It's especially nice to have a car in London on a Sunday when you can potter around doing chores and errands without fear of Congestion Charging or parking fees. This I did much of today, starting east and slowly moving back west. 

Then to my dismay, I realised I had forgotten about...

... dramatic pause...

WESTFIELD!!!

There is a point on the Shepherd's Bush Roundabout, where, if you are in the wrong lane you are destined to head to Westfield car park. There is no turning back, no slip road, no remission, no time off for good behaviour. It's one way to hell.

So not having driven this way for so long I found myself in a hour long queue heading into the bowels of a massive shopping centre. Three stories of car park exist underground where you feel like you are circling down into Dante's Inferno (no air conditioning).

If like me you normally use level -1, the car park nearest Waitrose and therefore sanity, being forced down to level -3 might seem like an easy spatial task. Imagining the layout above doesn't work however. All skills in spatial reasoning abandon you and you are left to rely on Lift Lobby's and arbitrary aisle numbers to find your way around.

It's all totally awful, made worse by the knowledge that you were being charged during the half hour between going through the barrier and finding a parking space.

Once inside the Divine Comedy continues. Mingling with thousands of the seemingly undead in the Mall above is not pleasurable at any point.

Back home much later I contemplated my three bags of shopping over the rim of a glass of Pimms and concluded that online grocery shopping must be one of the finest things to arrive in the last ten years.

Next time I will do that.