Morning:
4°c
The late Spike Milligan once challenged a parking ticket on the grounds that — as he firmly maintained — the traffic warden had sneaked up and painted a double yellow line underneath his car while he wasn't looking. What started as satire is, of course, now an established part of reality.
I ran into my little sister the other day, for instance, to find her labouring underneath a private thundercloud. Ungodly and blasphemous mutterings were issuing from her mouth, and her ordinarily unfurrowed brow resembled Keith Richards's neck. The cause of her woe was as follows, and it seems to me to be a little parable of London life.
One bright morning last week, she drove her car to work, and parked it in the Battersea street where she always does — one of the few places in London where parking is as free as the air.
She emerged from work that evening to find that during the course of the day a signpost had been erected beside her car announcing: “Permit holders only”. The cement holding the post in was still wet.
And tucked under her windscreen at a jaunty angle was a £60 parking ticket. I say £60, of course, but the face value of the charge is £120. It's presented as if the council is doing you a favour rather than issuing a threat. They're notdoubling it if you don't pay up within a fortnight; they're halving it if you do. Isn't that nice of them? Doesn't that incline you to think that it's best to cut your losses and pay straight off?
Appealing this ticket will be a long and wretched process. Like so many people in similar circumstances, my sister is wondering whether it's worth just paying up. Protesting against one of these bastards as often as not results in a glacial moraine of unsigned letters making successively heavier and more threatening demands until, will to live ebbing out through the soles of the feet, you give in and pay up.
I'm not privy to exactly how Wandsworth's parking control authority is run, so I don't know if either the placer of the ticket, or the erector of the sign, or both, were go-ahead private subcontractors. But a private sector-style targets culture is in evidence in local authorities across London. And though free-market fundamentalists may think business-style practices serve the public, the evidence suggests the opposite. Inefficiency, error, obduracy, lag and inertia are the local authority's friend.
There's no incentive for the council that relies on the collection of as many of these fines as possible to make the appeals process transparent or easy. There's no incentive for signpost-stickers-up and penalty-charge-issuers to communicate with each other to co-ordinate their efforts in a reasonable way.
And there's a positive disincentive for anyone fined unfairly to even bother trying to complain. If you do fight, the whole impersonal process costs everyone concerned (ultimately, us) more time and money and leaden despair than the fine is worth.
It's an odd failure of local democracy that we've incentivised a taxpayer-funded public service to be as hostile as possible to the taxpayers it serves.
This wood's got Tiger's name on it
Police have described as “unusual” the circumstances surrounding Tiger Woods crashing his car into a fire hydrant outside his house at 2.30am. I'll say. Mr Woods's attention strayed from the road, it is suggested, because — after reports of his alleged friendship with a “New York party girl” — his hitherto peacable wife was setting about his car windows with a mashie niblick.
Mrs Woods says it's all a terrible misunderstanding. He says it's all his fault. He'd locked the car from the inside for some reason quite unconnected to the mad waving of golf clubs, and she was simply using the club to help him out of the car after his accident. As the police said: unusual.
Golf has been good to Tiger Woods. He is reported to be sport's first dollar billionaire. But when he was flat on his back in his driveway with a highly strung ex-model brandishing the tools of his trade over his head, do you think he wished for an instant that he'd gone into ping-pong instead?
Campaign for Real Ale's charming headline
In Somerset for the weekend, I happen on Pints of View, official journal of the Campaign for Real Ale. Front page headline: “Somerset Brewer Scoops Top Awards At Somerset CAMRA's Beer Festival.” That is not a “Dog Bites Man” headline.
That is a “Dog Is Hairy, Says Woof'” headline. “Norfolk Brewer Scoops Top Awards At Somerset CAMRA's Beer Festival” would be intriguing; “Somerset Astronaut Scoops Top Awards At Somerset CAMRA's Beer Festival” more so. The original has a reassuring rustic charm to it, though, doesn't it?
Borders bookshop was useless
I'm sorry to see any bookshop fail but nobody who tried to buy a book from the big Borders in Oxford Street will greatly mourn its passing. Here was a bookshop that hadn't even figured out how to create a section called “Biography”. It was useless.
The rise of Amazon, along with the triumph of the three quid cappuccino, gave some booksellers the idea that the key to survival was to give up selling books and start selling coffee. Borders was this theory incarnate. Its implosion — praise be — decisively knocks it on the head.
Reader views (2)
I would suggest you sister does challenge the parking fine. She will get a fair hearing at the Parking Committee for London. I challenged an obscure parking sign in the City of London a few years ago. Although the City rejected the challenge, I took it on appeal to the Parking Committee for London and the barrister ruled in my favour. It wasn't that difficult or time consuming, just a few letters spelling out the facts and a photograph of the sign and its location in my submission.
- William Gardiner, London
If it makes anyone feel any better, after a typically patronising and pompous lecture from an Islington traffic warden who'd obviously been staking me out as I waited for 10 mins in a loading bay on my scooter, the same "public servant" decided to oh-so-authoritatively check my tax disc...he should have checked it a bit closer as the one on display was out of date (the new one had arrived that morning and has of course since been put on display)...I am thinking of writing to complain that he didn't do his job properly, but I'll probably just leave it, safe in the knowledge that I scored a small victory over the moron.
- St, London
