Observations on parking
I thought I had seen the last of shenanigans involving traffic cones when I left university ten years ago. But now I find them being wielded not only in broad daylight but by sober adults.
Last year we moved to a street in suburban south-west London next to a mainline station and a busy GP's surgery. There are no parking restrictions. A good thing, we thought. How wrong we were.
Coming from central London - where draconian "residents' parking" means no one ever wants to visit by car - we were looking forward to free parking for all our friends. Little did we know that the "free zone" would be even more strictly policed.
The egalitarian parking policy is not welcomed by many of our fellow residents. A significant minority believe they should be entitled to a space outside their house with their name written on it. They enforce this belief by use of the traffic cone.
And so our street divides into coneheads versus the anti-cones. I fall into the second category as (a) I would be too goody-goody to steal a traffic cone for my own personal use, and (b) I think it is petty to reserve a space in front of your own house when there is plenty of parking within a walkable distance. For the anti-cone among us, the cone represents a final descent into anarchy, an admission that we can no longer cope with the demands of urban living. I refuse to sink to that level, however inconvenient it may be to lug five carrier bags and a screaming child around the block. I wear my distant parker's martyrdom and cone-free status with pride.
For my conehead neighbours, however, the cone is the only thing separating them from apoplexy and potential attacks on other persons and their vehicles.
I do understand their fury. Commuters who live four or five streets away come and park outside their houses all day every day just to avoid walking to the station. Many of those on my street are elderly people who rarely use their cars - only to return home from their fortnightly drive to find they can't park within three streets, let alone outside their house. The cone is the only way they can fight back.
I do try to have sympathy for the coneheads but recently they have gone too far. A cone has started to appear, occasionally, outside my house. Do I give in and obey the self-made law of the illegally procured traffic cone? Or do I resist, remove the cone and provoke neighbourly unrest?
So far I have erred towards the former, except on one occasion when I was in a very bad mood and could not be bothered to find another parking spot. I removed the cone and hid it behind a hedge, hoping that the neighbour who had put it there would blame one of the evil commuters. I think I got away with it.
Street legend has it that the police once came and rounded up all the cones overnight, to mass indignation (and the secret relief of the anti-cones). In recent years they have turned a blind eye. I wonder if, in the light of the new police powers - under which, it seems, you can detain anyone for anything - they might be persuaded into action. In the meantime I am looking up the protocol for making a citizen's arrest. That, at least, is a legal way of taking the law into your own hands.
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