Are we Human or are we Bison?

So, it's been a busy old week; early starts, late finishes and a brain stuck in a go-slow rut of apathy, over-capacity and sheer can't-be-ars-ed-ness. But now, a prisoner to the tyranny of the task of transferring my hundreds of CDs to hard storage and backup, here I am at my desk with a whole weekend stretching ahead of me. Apart from work stuff, what to write (in between disc-changing every seven minutes)?

Well, I just popped up the shops and, as usual, contact with the teeming masses has provided dozens of opportunities to rail against the stupidity, thoughtlessness and downright idiocy of humans. I thought I was going to use the sequence in last week's Frozen Planet - where the musk oxen herd saves the calf from the wolves - to illustrate how pitchfork-bearing mobs of thick people beating at the doors of paediatricians are blindly following instinct, rather than revealing adherence to any higher moral code. But sod that; far too deep for a weekend.

No, no, I got mad about far more mundane stuff than that this morning. For instance the idiot who pulled out into an impossible gap in front of me when there was nothing behind me for another hundred yards (before you ask, yes of course it was a Beemerwanker). The pedestrian who decided to press the pelican anyway, then cross the clear road, causing several vehicles to later pull to a halt and wait for a green light for no reason whatsoever. The woman in the self-serve checkouts with a giant trolley containing no more than ten items - I'm prepared to bet she drives a 4x4. They all deserve my contempt and I have plenty to go around.

But today I was most incensed by a bloke accompanied by a whining, but fully able-bodied, ten-year old in a parking space marked something like this:

For balance you'll notice that I've scoured the world for signage in 'foreign', to show that this is an international phenomenon. The sign shows, quite clearly, a mother and a small, dependent child. We all know this. Such is the skewed nature of our non-rational, blindly instinctive attitude towards children that we put these spaces closer to the supermarket entrance than the disabled spaces. Oh yes, the herd mentality prospers; protect the sprog, reject the weak. Had there been wolves around this morning, the old dear hobbling in the zimmer-frame would have been dead meat, literally, but at least the ungrateful, pre-pubescent wunderkind would have been spared.

I'm mad enough about all of this stuff generally but it's not even that general injustice that made me see red today. Look at that sign again, bloke. See what it says? It clearly illustrates the natural order, mother and child. So you had no justification whatsoever for using that space. Your kid wasn't helpless, you only had the one sprog with you and you had no buggy or other paraphernalia to manhandle - for those incumberances I might have forgiven you. What I'm not forgiving you for is parking in a place designated by a picture of a girl.