Red, White and Blue

Near my flat there's a street where cars park in bays. Lot's of fancy flats with people who can afford cars. Each bay holds three cars. Each space in a bay has a number.

A few weeks ago I noticed that two of the sets of bays had the same colour of cars in the same order. Red, white and blue. (One of the white ones was a van but that still counts.) Great. I figured it would be neat if all the bays were in a similar pattern.

I took colour counts over the next few days. The problem is the white car thing was a freak. They were mostly silver, blue and black, with just the same couple of red ones thrown in. There were no white ones the next day.

There are five bays, each with three spaces, and it looks like people park in the same ones each night.

So I drew a map on a sheet of paper and wrote the space numbers on the spaces. Then I cut up fifteen rectangles of paper and wrote the car colours on the paper. It took me a couple of hours to find an arrangement I liked. There was an odd green one so that was a stand out for the middle. I had an odd blue and an odd silver and I didn't know if I should put them with the green. But the disharmony troubled me.

With my new plan I had to write the letters to ask the people to park in different bays. I told them to imagine themselves looking down on the ordered cars with a sense of satisfaction. It was hard to get the letters right. I had to ask space six to move to space eight. That was the green one, so it would be in the middle. I made a couple of mistakes and had to rewrite a few of the letters.

Once the letters were done I went round to the street. I had addressed them to "Driver in bay 6" and so on. I put the letters under the car windscreen wipers. Annoyingly two of the cars were missing and two others were different cars. I wan't sure what to do. Eventually I chose to leave the letters on the kerbs of the problem spaces.

The following night I went around to see the results. It was very disappointing. Nobody had bothered. I found a letter discarded in a rose bush. Number 4, one of the blue ones. I read it again. Then I began to see a problem. I hadn't said when. The poor uncoordinated souls.

I noticed a woman from an upstairs window pointing at me as I read the letter. A man joined her at her side. I left before the police came again.