A poster saying beware of the leopard

Our next door neighbour has two cars and no offroad parking, so wants to convert his front garden into a parking space. This seems a thoroughly reasonable venture to me, but given that he is our next door neighbour, we went this morning to the council offices to view the application. No problem, it won't impinge on us as far as we can tell, and he has our blessing.

I do however observe that he has had a failure of imagination. Rather ingeniously (I think) his plans involve a turntable. To save manoeuvring your car into position in a narrow space by means of the forward and reverse gears, you can buy a turntable. You drive straight in off the road, get out, manually turn the turntable so your car is facing its parking space, and - well - park. To get out into the road again, reverse the process.

But - manually? Come on! If I had a turntable for my car there's only one conceivable way it could work. It would require push button control from inside the car, preferably with the Thunderbirds launching music playing in the background. Has this man never seen a Gerry Anderson show? Or for that matter A Close Shave?

Honestly!