On Saturday night, I finally parallel parked properly, tucking Rodney expertly between two cars, albeit after some wriggling. Thus, it was with much anguish and a certain sense of injustice that I plucked the summons from between the wipers two hours later. So the car wasn’t actually parked in a parking lot. So it took up one lane on a two-lane, two-way road. So there was a no parking sign somewhere. Whatever happened to the appreciation of good motoring? How could the warden have failed to notice how dead centre Rodney was between the front and back cars? Or how he was precisely 8.1 inches from the curb? Or how the front wheels were shrewdly turned outwards to allow for an easier exit?

Little things count for a lot. And had the warden taken the time to just stand back and consider the artistic merit on display, I’m sure he/she would’ve had second thoughts. That’s what we need, Singapore. We need to learn to look at things for what they should be, not for what they are. We need to be able to look at the fat bird statue along the Singapore River and say, “this is an extremely creative impression of the result of too much birdseed” and not something like “Wah, bui jiao”. By extension, our traffic wardens need to see illegal parking not as illegal parking but as the culmination of the complex neural processes that make possible the hand-eye-mouth coordination needed to look between three mirrors while turning a plastic wheel furiously and yelling for everyone to shut the hell up at the same time.

Er… and that’s it.