Gareth E Rees is totally obsessed with retail car parks. He is quite candid about it, confessing that this may be due to his unstable mind, which is ‘seized momentarily by fantastical visions’ caused by ‘an epilepsy of the imagination’. Nevertheless, he has decided to go public. In Car Park Life he explores a succession of British retail car parks and records everything he sees, hears, smells and thinks there. Nothing escapes his eager, somewhat paranoiac eye. He reads the graffiti, describes the litter and regales us with details of murders and assaults in car parks and of corpses found in them.

I set sail in these pages expecting a light read with the odd titter. ‘Everyone has a car park story and I’m sure you have your own,’ Rees says with disingenuous jollity in a brief author’s note preceding the text. I rose to the challenge and considered whether I