Parking Mad
We do not think enough about parking, which is silly. For parking is to driving as death is to life: a supremely significant moment of definition, of closure, of release. The journey is not over until you have parked, as anyone who has driven round and round a town centre for a bewildering and increasingly surreal three and a half hours trying to find some kind of space could tell you. In this sense, parking is not only like death: it's like the afterlife, specifically the one imagined by Dante in his Purgatorio (which involved a lot of going round and round until eventual salvation). Of course, if you have not yet found a space, you are not in purgatory, you are in hell. It was not always like this.
[... some stuff about the good old pre-1960 days before parking meters ...]
As it is, none of the residents in the adjoining streets had the gumption to get up a petition, so people from miles around flock to my road. Cars are not so much double-parked as parked 'on top' of one another. The effect is of a strangely well-ordered scrapyard, but it makes getting the shopping out bloody difficult, especially if you've got kids. It looks as though we will have to cave in. Indeed, one has the ghastly fear that in a few years' time, every single last inch of tarmac in the country, from Shetland to Land's End, will have helpful white lines painted on them and those bloody ticket-dispensing boxes which are always five minutes' walk away.
You may notice, from the bad-tempered tone of this article, that parking is the kind of subject that brings out the worst in people. In this respect, parking is not like death, which, while often unpleasant, can nevertheless instil noble emotions and some great speeches. No, parking doesn't do that to one. Don't think I didn't notice you going 'Hear, hear' at Sir Wavell Wakefield's outburst a few paragraphs back. And you a Guardian reader. Shame on you.
No: parking is becoming increasingly stressful and a significant factor in the gradual loss of civility cultural commentators have noticed in our nation. (None, until now, has pinpointed the cause. One can attribute the legendarily vile temper of Parisians to the fact that no one has been able to find a parking space in their city since 1972.) Do you ever feel as murderous as when that space up the road you have been coveting is nicked by some bastard in a Peugeot 405, or as despairing as when another space turns out to be some piffling municipal concession to liberalism, like a disabled bay or hospital entrance?
[... dreary pseudo-anguish...]
I wish I could close this piece with an uplifting message, but there isn't one. Parking is terrible. No one, whether a man or a woman, knows how to park any more because no one has managed to find a space for weeks. When one does, the fees are not allowed to be spent on schools or hospitals: they are spent on traffic wardens - 'council parking attendants' - privatised, armed to the teeth. (Traffic wardens have been released to patrol red routes and destabilise popular socialist governments in Third World countries.) One day, someone will find a solution to this madness. But what, one wonders, are these wretched people trying to do? Get us to use public transport or something?
at me. I totally forgot Will Self got busted for doing heroin on Tony Blair's jet
