My year-long battle with the parking profiteers

I had been cross enough about having to go to Sennen Cove. Aside from the fact that I don’t care for the place — what is the point of a Cornish beach if the sand is too coarse-grained for sandcastles? — I resented the fact that I would not even be able to park near the place I hated. The car park on the beach is full from nine in the morning; I would have to drive up to the town — which is so far away that some of the houses aren’t even second homes — and walk. Furiously I bought a ticket, chucked it in the car and marched down the cliff to the beach. When I returned to find a parking fine on the windscreen, I was, I admit, not in the holiday spirit.

I assumed that sending a scan of the ticket to Armtrac, the parking company, would resolve matters. The ticket machine printed the last three letters of my registration number, so I could show it was the ticket I had bought — or that there was only a one in 13,824 chance that it was someone else’s ticket. Something like that.

BW Legal would send letters; I would send another photocopy of the ticket

I went down a rabbit hole in the research on that one. There were 24 possibilities for each letter (I and Q not being used), so you would expect the odds to be 24 cubed; but that is to forget about the combinations which the DVLA does not issue — ASS, SEX and JEW are some, as are some that are unpronounceable profanities in Welsh. I could not find the full list — which would bring the odds down slightly. But that would assume the cars were randomly distributed between geographical areas…