A Glamorous Career

Astrolabe Mamaripreponderance first shot to fame as a theoretical physicist and topless model in the late 1970s. Although, as she later confessed, in a caption accompanying a photo-shoot for page 3 of New Physics Review, her ambition was always to be a car park attendant.

Back in those days, of course, a car park attendant was not the glamorous career it later became in the heady days of the immediate post-Thatcher era when Car Park Attendant became the career for the young and thrusting. In those earlier, pre-Thatcherite (and more innocent), days car park attending was still the preserve of those rather small, wizened old men with a gammy leg, flat cap and a ¾-inch stub of semi-masticated roll-up seemingly welded to their lower lip.

However, after deregulation and privatisation, car parks became no longer just bits of derelict land with only a precarious attendant's shed; containing half a roll of cheaply-printed tickets, and a seemingly stone-age electric kettle. It was now the sensational age of the multi-storey car park. These new, glamorous, locations instantly became the fashionable place to hang out, and not as a makeshift public urinal, or for quick hand-relief around the back of the concrete support pillars. Consequently, the owners of these hip new joints wanted attendants with a glamour and presence to match their new status as the hip, happening places.

During those early years of the fashionable new multi-story car park, Houndstooth Triteweasel was the multi-story car park magnate for most of the 1980s, owning several multi-story car parks in the then trendy and happening town of Tewksbury alone.

Moreover, as a keen amateur devotee of topless theoretical physicists, Triteweasel was more than aware of Mamaripreponderance's oft-stated desire to become the UK’s leading car park attendant. However, at the time Mamaripreponderance was head of research at the Uk’s leading linear small mammal particle collider in Abersoch, where they were about to perform the world’s first accelerated collision between a hamster and a kitten in order to attempt to isolate the ‘cute’ and/or ‘fluffy’ particles that Mamaripreponderance’s theoretical work predicted.

Nevertheless, Triteweasel’s offer of a job as Head Car Park Attendant at his flagship Droitwich multi-story was an offer that Mamaripreponderance just could not refuse. Therefore, turning her back on her topless scientific career, and excellent prospect of achieving a Nobel Prize for her theoretical work on the ‘fluffy’ particle, Mamaripreponderance realised her childhood dream and became – at long last – a car park attendant.

Of course, her career-change is a great loss to gratuitous scientific semi-nudity, especially in the field of theoretical physics. However, personal happiness for Mamaripreponderance came first and we can only respect that, despite our misgivings.