The husband and I were going out for a Sunday drive. Our car had been parked on the adjacent street for the past week due to limited parking availability on our own street. Since I’d not driven anywhere since the previous weekend, the car had been there all week.

When we got to the car, there was a big brown splodge on the windscreen.

My first thought was “bloody seagulls!”. Living in a coastal city, seagulls are a regular menace and cars often get a bit of a pebble-dashing from them. However, I think a seagull that deposited that mess would have had a wingspan of about ten metres.

It was clear that the car had been vandalised.

The husband said that it was probably due to the Pride decals that it had been singled out. The car was about a third of the way down the street, if that’s of any significance to a possible deliberate attack.

Like an idiot, I set about trying to clean the windscreen: I should have photographed the evidence!

The gloop was stuck hard in places and way thicker than the windscreen wipers could cope with, so I used the de-icing tool to scrape it off, and then used wet-wipes to smear the rest of it all over the windscreen.

Barbeque sauce and mustard.

I was irritated by the attack, but also upset: this car had been my mum’s and she would have been upset to know that it had been vandalised – especially that it was probably targeted because of our sexuality.

Thank god the car had only be assaulted with condiments: nothing was broken.

After a while, I got the screen clean enough to see. As we set off, the husband again said that “it was probably a homophobic attack due to the rainbow decals on the car”.

I said “that just shows that there is still a need for Pride”.

I have reported the incident to the police via the online portal. They can’t do anything about it, but I do want it known that a homophobic event has occurred.