‘Welcome to Victims First. Please leave your name and number and we will return your call. Beeeeeeeeeeeep!’
I had rung the number given to me by the police to pay my fixed penalty fine for not having an MOT.
This £100 I was trying to pay was coming out of an increasingly tight household budget, incidentally, so I decided that the fairest thing to do was to claw it back from the state.
I had, of course, deeply apologised to the officer who pulled me over for forgetting the MOT after the Covid extension period ran out. And I begged him to let me drive straight home, park off road, and take the Volvo to be tested the very next morning. But he insisted I had to be fined.
Looking through my list of direct debits, I decided to stop paying the council for garden waste collection, the annual subscription for which was due, so I let it lapse.
The state should know that what they take with liberal abandon, we have to scratch around like thieves in the night to find, and sometimes that means scratching around places they would normally be allowed to fish for more money in.
Darn it all, really, because I got pulled over at night when I turned right out of a garage that the copper said had a sign saying no right turn, but which in fact, when I went back to look, had an unlit sign that was invisible in the dark.
Having pulled me over, he discovered my MOT had lapsed. Fair enough. But I then had to call and ask the police repeatedly to help me pay the ticket as it hadn’t printed properly. A policewoman finally emailed me the details and a phone number to pay.
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