Nothing beats a good rant: When the car park lift got stuck, Rosalind Twist got a ticket . . .

I have just lost my temper. Lost it completely, utterly, irrevocably. As this only happens to me about once in every 10 years, it has a powerful cleansing feel to it. I sit here feeling like the echo of a harp string plucked and think I ought to do it more often.

It all started with a lunch invitation from an old friend. We agreed to meet in the town's shopping precinct. I parked in the multi-storey car park and took the lift down. There was my friend, in the lift. The doors shut, there was a jolt, a drop and a shudder. The lights went out and that was it. Eight of us, stuck between floors four and five.

I'd never been trapped in a lift before. Frankly, it was boring. Pitch dark and deadly boring. Bearing in mind that many, many years ago my friend and I considered marriage until a chance moment of sobriety brought us to our senses, we had remarkably little to talk about.

'I spy with my little eye, something beginning with L'

'Shut up,' I said, rather rudely. One of our number wondered whether her boss would believe her when she told him why she was late back from lunch. Another confessed to having been on his way to the gents.

'I hope I can hang on,' he muttered darkly. So did we.

After 20 minutes a disembodied voice announced that we were trapped in the lift. Hmm. Another of the lift's occupants began to whimper in a manner that warned of an impending full-scale panic attack. I groped for the control panel in the hope of finding an emergency light switch, but only succeeded in poking the whimperer in the eye - which at least had the effect of postponing the screams.

The crackly voice came again: 'Don't worry, we'll have you out in a jiffy.'

A jiffy turned out to be 45 minutes, by which time I was beginning to hope that someone would poke me in the eye, as vaguely hysterical notions stirred. We spoke in hushed tones, invisible to each other and clung on to each other's sleeves. When the lift lurched into life, we all dropped to the floor, fearing an uncontrolled plummet, gripping strange hands fumbled for in the dark.

As we eventually staggered out of the lift, blinking into the light, we looked awkwardly at each other, embarrassed now at our former intimacy. The sound of sprinting and the bang of the gents' toilet door marked the departure of one of us, before anyone had a chance to thank him for his bladder control. A small crowd had gathered to watch us emerge, dishevelled, into the shopping precinct.

A glass or two of Chianti restored my equilibrium and that of my friend. Having dutifully inquired after respective spouses and children and discussed the nature of claustrophobia, we returned to the car park - yes, we used the stairs this time - and were just in time to see a uniformed car park attendant slap a pounds 35 excess charge ticket on my windscreen.

'But we were stuck in your lift for an hour,' I reasoned sweetly. He impaled me with the sharp look of someone well used to being reviled and pointed to my own ticket.

'You bought a two-hour ticket, madam. You had time to return to the car and renew it before it expired.' And then he actually said it: 'Besides, I'm only doing my job.'

At this point my friend took my place in the discussion as I had succumbed to speechlessness. I heard them wrangle and argue. I heard the attendant declare in tones of He who had created the Heavens and the Earth that, having issued an excess charge ticket, nothing could retract it.

That expression 'seeing red' describes it very well. I did see red. It was only when Peter drew four crisp pounds 10 notes from his wallet that I actually blew my stack. Not just at the attendant, but at poor old Peter as well. It couldn't have lasted for more than a minute, but boy, was it good.

More lucid than I've ever been, I raged on and on, the two men frozen in my vision. When I ran out of steam, the attendant was retreating rapidly, a way of removing the offending ticket having been miraculously found. Another small crowd had gathered. Peter was putting his coat round my shoulders rather in the manner of the trainer of a victorious boxer after a fight.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' we kept saying to each other. But I'm not sorry at all. Venting one's feelings has a peculiarly liberating taste to it. The very danger is intoxicating.

How wonderful to say exactly what you think in a way that makes your tormentor stare, mouth agape, flapping useless hands in an attempt to calm you, retracting all in the face of such an outburst. People pay good money to feel like this. No drugs, no therapy. All they need is a little goading . . . and wham] The power.