This hit me like a tonne of bricks the day Gabs did me the favour of picking the fifteen-year-old me (the age at which one most hates one's parents) up in a fluorescent green Fiat Panda, deploying the sadism unique to all parents to park as closely as humanly possible to the school gates. As if it weren't achingly obvious that my mother were driving a giant bogey, she proceeded to proudly proclaim, 'It's Guacamole Green!!!', its official colour barely more forgiving than its actual one. Storm Grey, sure, Cobalt Black, genius, even, for a culinary equivalent, Chili Pepper Red, but Guacamole Green? Delicious, but vomit-coloured, guacamole? Needless to say, the rarity that already was the motherly school pick-up was nigh on obliterated, and when it did occur was from then on a spy-like operation, requiring a continuous stream of communication between Gaby and I to ensure maximum secrecy and minimal embarrassment.
However it's all change in Italy, which is, it transpires, the LAND of the Fiat Panda. Boxy monstrosities of every colour of the rainbow litter the streets and cruise along the superstrada with barefaced pride. Misleadingly, the photo below was taken (as is obligatory whenever one sees a Guacamole Green Fiat Panda, wherever one is in the world, immediately - such is their rarity) in Salamanca:
The worst insult of all is that the Italian police drive them (in their entirely unnecessary 4x4 incarnation). What is at home a source of unspeakable shame is, in the topsy-turvy world that is Italy, a national mascot.
It is both unsurprising and randomly irrelevant, therefore, that the Panda's small p counterpart is yet another source of parental obsession. The silly season is when Gabs and Steve truly come into there own: with no obligatory "real" news to take notice of (other than that minor kerfuffle in Syria, perhaps), they devote their energies to fully-blown zoophilia. Each morning, I am confronted with yet another newspaper clipping detailing the life and times of Tian Tian, Edinburgh Zoo's resident panda, whose face has long taken pride of place over the trivia of doctor's appointments, flight times etcetera. News just in: Tian Tian may be (restless nights surely in store for those who cannot cope with such excruciating uncertainty) pregnant. G and S, along with the rest of nutters who think animals are more important than people, are overjoyed. The week has been an absolute triumph for parents and therefore, necessarily, for pandas.
