The Landlady joins the queues
May I just say that if I had a car and could actually legally drive it, that I would have been sectioned by now. The stress that drivers – or more pertinently, ‘parkers’ – who live in Brighton have to go through is unbelievable. I was recently driving in Africa, where no-one seems to care whether you have a licence or not and the driving is so hair-raisingly appalling that my driving skills are on a par with theirs, even though I haven’t driven for 27 years and do not possess a licence.
“I was more off the road than on it, due to my initial incompetence”
The reason I am talking about driving and parking is because of my recent forays behind the wheel, where just for a moment, I thought that I might come back to Brighton and take my driving test, so much did I enjoy my time behind the wheel of The Boyfriend’s 4×4. I hasten to add, that it was a good job that it was an ‘off-road’ vehicle, as for most of the duration of my first driving trip, I was more off the road than on it, due to my initial incompetence.
On returning to Brighton I was unlucky enough to have to endure 56 minutes of the stress that drivers in Brighton probably have to go through on a regular basis. My friend ‘Miss D’, a marvellous gardener had agreed to come and chop back the wilderness at the back of my house, in a quest to unearth my garden, for my birthday present, so I had to go and buy a guest parking permit from Hove Town Hall. I entered Hove Town Hall at 11 minutes past 9, to join a queue of 37 – I counted – very irritated fellow ‘parkers’. Due to a ‘technical fault’, the queue was moving at the pace of a holidaying tortoise, much to the anger of the baying crowd. I overheard one of the council operatives telling a customer that his permit would be with him in six weeks, by which time I surmised that I’d probably have reached the front of the queue. Other people, who’d come to pay parking fines had parked outside and had probably received another ticket because they’d been there for so long.
An old lady nearly fainted and had to leave the queue, only to find that she had been standing woozily in the wrong queue for half an hour. As time ticked on, my initial anger and impatience faded as I thought of all those poor people in Cyprus standing in similar queues at the bank in order to take out a tiny proportion of their own money which had been ring-fenced by the Cypriot government. By the time I reached the front of the queue – at 7 minutes past 10 – I was feeling calm and philosophical about the whole experience and almost counting my blessings. Then I discovered that the day before, the vouchers had gone up by 10p to £2.60…and I only had £2.50 on me. That’s 56 minutes I’ll never get back…
