Recently I posted the word σταρχιδισμός, which means “je m’en foutisme”. There is no neat equivalent in English, and certainly not a very Anglo-Saxon counterpart to “insouciance”.
My small village has a street market every Friday. And every Friday arse-holish parking becomes a serious issue. Every Friday some lazy bastard causes chaos by parking on the corner where buses need to turn. Result. The bus driver beeps his horn – sometimes for twenty minutes – until the arsehole returns. Parking is a huge problem in Thessaloniki but here in the village it is just a matter of an increased walk of 50-100 metres on a Friday that people are too lazy to do.
In the attached picture (taken on market day), the woman committed three examples of illegal behaviour. She drove on the wrong side of the road. She parked on a corner – so badly that the rear of her car jutted into the perpendicular street. She blocked wheelchair access and egress. All illegal. Finally, she couldn’t even be arsed to park straight.
In keeping with Greeks and their unhealthy attachment to cars, allow me to digress a little. In Greece we still do not put toilet paper into the lavatory bowl. Instead, we put it in a wastepaper basket. It can be a grizzly business. In supermarkets you can buy scented plastic bags with ties specially designed to contain the arsewipes. Scented or not, it is never a pleasant task to collect and dispose. What is the connection between used toilet paper and cars? My road comes to a dead end. Behind my flat you cannot drive more than about 70 metres. Recently, a car pulled up alongside the municipal bins. A woman in her 30s got out and removed a big bag of rubbish AND an equally big bag of arse paper. Either she had been collecting it for weeks or her family had had a huge problem with gastroenteritis. She couldn’t have driven more than 50 metres. I asked myself, “Why didn’t she walk to the bins and then return to the car?”
The above should not be construed as an attack on women. In both cases the drivers were women.
On a more positive note, a couple of months ago I wrote about the lack of pavements in the village. I don’t know what happened. Maybe the mayor is one of the nine people who read this blog, but lo and behold!! Pavements have been repaired and even built; roads have been resurfaced; and potholes have been filled in. And finally, maybe one of my readers might be a policeman. The car registration above is perfectly readable. Maybe the police will impose a fine.