Childishly, fatuously, I used to play a little game with Lambeth Council that saved me £20 a year.
The game went like this: every time my residential parking permit was up for renewal, I used to not renew it for a month, during which time I would park my car five streets away where the parking was free.
I called this Parking Freedom Month. The first day of Parking Freedom Month was a lot like tax freedom day, when you start working for yourself, and stop working for the taxman. The only difference was, Parking Freedom Month only applied to me, because I could never persuade anyone else in my street to do it.
Maybe that was not so surprising. It was an awful lot of bother, not parking outside my house and driving every night to a street ten minutes’ walk from my house, just to get one over on the council. But I really enjoyed doing it, because I felt as if I was, in my own sad way, defeating the loons and their thieving ‘emissions’ permits.
The month I spent not paying, I rationalised tragically, meant that my yearly parking charges were reduced by 8.3 (recurring) per cent and the best part was that Lambeth was powerless to stop me. It could not force me to park outside my own house. If I wanted to trudge from the outskirts of Streatham back to my home in Balham in the dark every night, there wasn’t a thing it could do about it. This is what passes for feeling empowered nowadays.
I wasn’t all that confident, however. I thought about sending the leader of the council a letter informing him of the action I was taking, but didn’t because I couldn’t be sure he would not react by making the whole of Streatham a controlled parking zone, just to clamp down on me.
Imagine the memo. ‘It has come to our attention that certain citizens in the central control zone are parking their emission-mobiles outside the houses of comrades in the free zone in order to avoid compensating the earth for their CO2 crimes. This vile, bourgeois behaviour must be stamped out before the safety of all our citizens in Londonasia is put at risk.’
I did, however, become audacious enough to extend Parking Freedom Month by a few weeks each year until last year I parked in Streatham and walked home for three months. That meant — I love to spell it out — that what should have been a £180 permit actually cost me £135.
OK, fine, so I handed over £180 to the girl with the ludicrously long fingernails with sparkly bits on the tips who couldn’t press the keys on her keyboard properly. But I’m sure you get what I mean. This is about the spirit of defiance. Vive la résistance. No surrender!
This year, things were complicated by the fact that I traded the little Peugeot in for a Volvo which, predictably enough, was at the very far end of the scale of charges. In fact, when I looked up how much it would cost to park a Volvo estate outside my house I almost drove it straight back to the dealer. Three hundreds pounds.
I made a decision. I would extend Parking Freedom Month to 12 months of the year. Every morning, I have been getting up, putting Cydney in the Volvo and driving it to the free parking streets, after which I walk the dog home via Tooting Common.
What could be nicer. Every time I need to drive somewhere, I simply shout ‘walkies!’, go and get the car, then when I come back I park it overnight outside my house. Then I move it again in the morning.
This does cause a bit of rumpus at 10 a.m. when I burst out of the house, half-dressed, Cydney pulling me across the road as I button my coat and slurp from a coffee cup, desperate to get in the car before the watershed when the charging period starts.
Yesterday, as the parking wardens circled like vultures, we got to the car just in time but there was already something on my windscreen. It wasn’t a ticket. It was a scrap of paper bearing the scrawled message: ‘Bad Parking!’
A neighbour had decided to censure my stay during the free hours overnight on the grounds that there was too big a gap between me and the car in front. No wonder no one was joining me for Parking Freedom Month. It was all becoming clear.
I stared at the parking warden circling on his moped. Then I stared at the sign under my wipers.
It was one of those moments when you look from pig to man and from man to pig and can no longer see the difference.
Comments