Dear People of Helensville...

We're all familiar with looking in the refrigerator to find nothing satisfactory and closing the door with disillusionment, only to repeat the process a few minutes later for some reason nobody quite understands.

That's partly why I get annoyed with the local supermarket on my commute to work, but mysteriously why I still go there nearly every day.

And for the past four years I have lamented the lack of choice in products. "Why?!" I would cry out in my head, perplexed. Why would the only supermarket for miles not do the decent thing and offer the locals more than a few flavours of ice cream, yoghurt and a selection of interesting products that would inspire you to shop there more often, out of gluttony rather than necessity? Surely that would be good business?

That was, until today.

Today the penny dropped as I realised that much though I love the locals of Helensville, free-choice is a dangerous thing in their hands.

The gold car is correct and the SUV and other car are simply lazy.

The gold car is correct and the SUV and other car are simply lazy.

The locals have not, as yet, figured out how to use a petrol station.

In New Zealand we drive on the left hand side of the road. It is an unspoken but logical rule, therefore, that you enter a petrol station from the first entrance as experienced from the left-hand side of the road, and leave on the second, thereby facilitating you to drive through and continue on your journey.

Not in Helensville, it seems.

On at least half the occasions I stop to fill up I find myself nose-to nose with some idiot who has been too lazy to drive the extra ten metres down the median strip to pull into the first entrance. And I have taken it upon myself to punish the perpetrators with the thing they fear the most - inconvenience.

Having tried and failed to persuade the owners of the petrol station to enforce common-sense, I find that the most effective way of training the locals is to park my 4x4 in the entranceway to the pumps and queue up, with no attention paid to whose exit I might be blocking (after all, if they had entered correctly, this would not be an issue). Seeing them gesticulate wildly and honk their horns is especially satisfying, as is watching smaller cars (which to my mind are the biggest culprits) desperately trying to perform sixty point turns to escape their petroleum prison.

I don't doubt, of course, that each and every one of these hardened criminals believes that I am the problem in the situation, but just for a minute, it is nice to watch the delivery of instant car-ma.

As I mope about the aisles of the supermarket tomorrow, dejected and disappointed with the lack of choice, at least I will not be confused; if the Helensvilleites cannot use a petrol station, how would they cope with the power of the knowledge that mint and chocolate is an ice-cream flavour?