Day 87: Chocolate Bonnet

This afternoon someone left a half-eaten chocolate bar on the bonnet of my car.   My street is a cul de sac, so no passing pedestrian traffic.  It feels like a deliberate comment.  I wonder whether this is the suburban mafia equivalent to a horse's head in my bed (bar is to car as head is to bed).

It's naked.  Wrapperless.  So it's not like it's been put to one side whilst a mobile is rummaged for in the bottom of a bag.  And anyway, you wouldn't randomly leave a snack on the middle of a bonnet for safe-keeping.  On a wall - maybe.  Even the edge of a bonnet.  But the middle?  No. 

Anything half-eaten always feels like an insult.  It's not the first time I've had leftovers on my bonnet (and that's not a euphemism).  I once broke down on a junction in East Finchley, late at night.  I was standing miserably in the rain, waiting for the AA, when someone lobbed a half-eaten kebab from the top of the night bus.  It hit the bonnet squarely, and the impact left me speckled with chili sauce and strands of lettuce.  It felt artistic and appropriate.  We were stranded in the rain both wearing the badges of our shame and pain. The car's - for failing on a junction (again). And mine, for driving a C-reg Ford Orion (and yes, this was only about six years ago...).  Like a 80s film - that bit where the protagonist has fallen incredibly low, just before the climb to redemption and triumph. 

But this, today, is just plain weird.  The car is parked appropriately.  Yes, it could do with a wash, but it's not even two years old yet, and on a dull day the dirt's not showing.  And the bar has been PLACED.  Carefully centred. 

Someone CHOSE to do this.  I am intrigued.

Can't help wondering if this an oblique comment on my slackness at shifting the post-Christmas flab...  (Some of my neighbours have hanging baskets and clipped hedges - they like a well-maintained frontage.)  If it is, I applaud the inventiveness of the gesture, even though I resent the interference. 




Don't pressurise me, man.  I'm more of a drift-planter.