Arriving at 07h00, one has only to fight off the drunkenly parked toilet roll trucks and the cars of illicit boyfriends visiting Fuller, still steamed with last nights promise of passion. Five minutes later and the last spot has gone, leaving the difficult decision of whether to risk the last of your petrol doing one final lap of hope, or conceding defeat and bumping some Cambria staffer.
This privilege of reconnecting to one's primitive hunting instinct will, from next year, cost the Shaikly sum of a thousand bokke. Pith helmets and binoculars will still need to be purchased separately.
In the crannies of my memory lurks the recall of a public appearance some time back where the Campus Access Management Plan was deburkahed. Amidst all the excitement that such occasions generate - it isn't every day that visitors from Bremner find their way to Real Campus - we were promised carrots along with our sticks. Parking fees would increase, we were told, but there would also be alternatives. Off-Campus parking would be made available, connected by the fleet of Jammie Shuttles, absolving us of the need to bring our planet-fryers into our Historic Precinct. Parking that would be accessible, safe, and sufficient.
Which it may be to serve the needs of the three staff who live near Rochester Road. Or those driving in from the Overberg, for whom a few additional dozen kilometres are neither here nor there. But for those of us battling our way in from the Deep South - and, as a visit to Capricorn Pick 'n Pay on a Sunday will reveal, there are *lots* of us - that additional distance stuck in rush hour traffic edging past our ultimate destination just don't make sense. Neither in the additional damage to the planet, nor in the refried engines overheated still further. But parking south of Campus remains a wet dream.
So no carrot then, but plenty of stick.
Which makes us pretty lucky, really - imagine what we'd be paying for such services through the Adult Personal Services smalls in the Argus.