You couldn’t make it up
If I’m ever stuck for a plot for a dark and twisted dystopian sci-fi novel I must remember to open my front door and start a conversation with a traffic warden. You are always guaranteed a richly surreal and deeply macabre experience when you engage with the bizarre regime of local authorities which charge people to park outside their own homes.
The other day I went out to remonstrate with a warden over a fine that had been issued to my father for parking slightly to the left of the correct bay for visitors. He’d only been there a few minutes, and as the visitor bay was empty it was obviously an honest mistake. But of course we know that is not how it works. A little moped appeared from nowhere, a man in black descended and a yellow envelope was placed on the windscreen. No matter that my father was still walking away from the car and could easily have been told he was in the wrong place. No matter that he had bought a ticket. No matter that the road in question is a quiet street miles from any shops, with rows and rows of parking to spare. No matter that I pay £200 for a permit to park my car there and £2.10 an hour for visitors. No matter. The little moped came and the man in black got off and the yellow envelope was tucked inside the wiper.
But that wasn’t the surreal bit. The surreal bit came when I ran out of the house to try to argue with him about the brutality of being charged £60 for being a few inches to the wrong side of a sign in an empty street miles from anywhere. He smiled almost serenely at me, a weird glassy look in his eyes and said: ‘I know, it’s terrible, isn’t it? I got one this morning.’ And he tapped the very bike he was sitting on and shook his head as if to say, ‘Those crazy parking-fine kids!’
I told him I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. He would have to explain himself better because for a moment there he had seemed to suggest that he, the parking attendant, had just been given a parking ticket. And that couldn’t be right because that would denote that we were all living in some insane nightmare.
But it was right. The parking attendant said he had pulled up on his moped to put a ticket on a car, when another parking attendant on a moped pulled up and put a ticket on him. Right there, he said, pointing to the place on his bike where his ‘colleague’, if we can call him that, had fixed a fine. He rang his bosses at the council to object but they were impervious to his pleading and said he would have to pay up. Consequently he was a bit short of money and would need to put quite a few more tickets on cars to make up his wages in commission. He looked at me as if to say, ‘You understand, I’m sure.’
Are you still with me? It takes a bit of getting your head around this one, doesn’t it? It’s like chewing one of those rock-hard toffees people insist on buying at Christmas. No matter how much you chew, it never becomes remotely digestible.
I struggled too. I was not about to believe this craziness. I said to him: ‘Let me get this right: you, the parking warden, have just been given a parking ticket while giving someone a parking ticket…?’
I grilled him for half an incredulous hour but it came down to the same indigestible fact. ‘You should appeal,’ he said to me. ‘They might let you off.’ The poor guy had the look of someone who had been subjected to many hours of painful conditioning at the Gracefield Gardens community-parking-attendant training and personal development centre. I felt so sorry for him I almost offered to put my car in an incorrect bay so he could ticket me. But I decided that, on balance, my father and I had probably done our bit.
I walked back to my house, knowing with great certainty what I have long suspected, that the world in which we live is already a dystopia. We are clearly no longer governed by sentient beings or even just beings who are little bit corrupt. We are ruled by alien life forms who think nothing of sending out spies on motorbikes followed by more spies to spy on them.
Presumably they will soon have to send out spies to spy on the spies spying on the spies. And so it goes on.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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