A friend offers to take me to lunch to cheer me up. I tell him, ‘No, really, don’t. I’m a disaster area when I’m under the weather. You don’t want to get involved.’
I try to explain my theory of cross-catastrophe. I am one of those people for whom troubles come in multitudes. I don’t just get sick, I get sick and then my washing machine explodes and my roof starts leaking and my rabbit eats the Sky cables.
I try to explain that if he really wants to help he will come over and hammer large pieces of crooked wood over my windows. But he won’t listen. He pitches up at my house and insists we take my car to the little French restaurant five minutes away on Wandsworth Common.
I tell him this is madness. If I manage to get us to the restaurant without crashing, I am hardly going to be able to park without infringing every single traffic code in the book. He tells me not to be silly and when we get there he insists on buying the ticket from the machine and positioning it carefully on the dashboard himself.
‘Well, all right, then,’ I say doubtfully, checking the ticket to make sure it really is valid for two hours. Then I lock the car, then double lock the car, then unlock the car to make sure the double locking hasn’t negated the locking, then lock it again, then try the handles. Then I walk around the car examining it from every angle to make sure there isn’t anything that could be construed as an infringement in the distance between the tyres and the white lines. Then I check and recheck the road signs to make sure this really is meter parking and when I am about to unlock the doors again my friend grabs my arm and pulls me away.
Lunch is so-so. Frankly, I could have done without a goats’ cheese salad and a slice of liver for all the fretting and worrying that went with it. When we get back to the car, I am not surprised. He, on the other hand, is outraged. ‘What! I don’t believe it! How is this possible?’ He grabs the penalty charge notice off the windscreen and rips it open. ‘Ah, here’s your bloomer,’ I say, pointing to the ticket he bought, which is upside down on the dashboard. ‘When we shut the car doors it blew over.’
On the way home he is full of regrets about doing me a good deed which has only created more problems. I feel so vindicated that I decide to be magnanimous in victory. I tell him not to worry. Plus, it occurs to me that the contravention has taken place in Wandsworth not Lambeth, which might make a nice change — a bit of penalty charge tourism.
I appeal immediately by sending in a copy of the ticket with an explanation about how it flipped over and after a few days, I decide to ring. Now, I know that Wandsworth is a flagship Tory council, and I know that Lambeth is the most rotten borough in the history of local government. But nothing prepares me for what follows.
I dial the switchboard and a nice lady who speaks perfect English answers the phone straightaway. When I ask to speak to someone about a parking ticket she says, ‘Yes, of course, I’ll just put you through.’ And after a few seconds she does put me through. No recorded message. No options. The phone simply rings and then a man, who also speaks perfect English, says in a friendly voice, ‘Hello, Josh speaking.’
I am now completely disorientated. I tell Josh my problem and instead of telling me that I brought the whole thing on myself he says, ‘Yes, that does happen a lot. Don’t worry, they will probably cancel it.’ And if they don’t, he says, I will still be able to pay at the reduced rate — a super-soaraway £30, half the price of a Lambeth ticket.
Josh doesn’t sound smug, or self-righteous, or pleased that I’m suffering. I love Josh. When Josh asks me if there is anything else he can help me with, I want to say, ‘Please take us. We’re right on the border, you know. We pay our taxes, but they hate us. They fine us for everything and they shout at us when we put our bin an inch too far to the left…Oh give us refuge, please!’
But I say no thanks, and he wishes me a nice day. When I put the phone down I feel reborn. I am full of hope and there is a spring in my step. They say a change is as good as a rest.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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