Roving Reporter
“Even when the Lightweight is parked up by the roadside, it is still managing to cause trouble”
Darling, someone has left a note on the windscreen of your car,” announces my mum in concerned tones over Skype. “Your brother drove past the Land Rover this morning and spotted it.”
“Oh, how interesting,” I say. “Can you ask him to drive back round and see what it says?” After the recent incident involving a pair of lorry drivers breaking into my legallyparked Lightweight, pushing it several metres up a steep hill and leaving it illegally parked, just so they could get their caravan past, I relocated it to a different part of town.
I actually thought this was the perfect road for the Land Rover to be left unmolested during the months I am globe-trotting. An exceptionally long, wide and flat residential street, past which any oversized cargo could pass, with no parking restrictions.
Noticing a shiny new Range Rover in one driveway, I selected the road outside that house for my first spot, parking there late at night. “It’ll be nice for them to see what a real Land Rover looks like in the morning,” I told my mum with a chortle. “Darling, not everyone appreciates your tatty old Land Rover you know,” she said. “But it’s a historic vehicle,” I protested, helping her to clamber out.
A few excursions later, and knowing I would be leaving the Lightweight there for a good few weeks, my mum insisted I should park behind a tree, to spare posh residents the daily horror of viewing the peeling paintwork of my pride and joy from their windows. With filial obedience I obliged, selecting a section of road outside a house with a walled garden sporting plenty of shrubs, and the most enormous driveway accommodating two modern cars. I also parked discreetly behind a roadside tree, to provide further camouflage from the house, locked up and gave the Lightweight a friendly pat. And there it has stayed, for the last fortnight.
“Darling, the note says: ‘Please move the car. We have visitors for Easter. Thanks.’ What should we do? Shall I get Nick to move it for you?” says Mum, in nervous tones. “What?” I cry with outrage. “Absolutely not. Don’t touch it. That road is vast and they have an enormous driveway for their Easter guests. Anyway, I pay my road tax and am therefore legally allowed to park on the public highway.” My mum listens patiently to a spiel she has endured numerous times before.
Of course, if there was a genuine need for the Lightweight to be moved, I would have got someone to shift it immediately but this is no emergency and the caravan incident has left me still full of righteous indignation about parking rights. I also find this sort of small-mindedness from my fellow countrymen about imaginary rights to areas of the road running past their enormous properties extremely annoying. Although there are far more important issues, both global and national, about which to become enraged, parking rights have become something of a bête noir for me, brought on by a series of issues encountered in small-town England.
Some years ago, in this same town, one local resident actually squandered public money by phoning the Fire Brigade in an effort to get the Lightweight moved from outside their property, claiming the very modest puddle of oil beneath it was, in fact, a petrol leak. The Fire Brigade dutifully showed up, and left me a very courteous note on the driver’s seat explaining the situation and asking me to get it checked out, which I dutifully did.
So there, behind its little tree, the Lightweight stays. “Darling, there’s another note on the Land Rover,” says Mum, a few weeks later. “My friend Len drove past today and saw it. It’s late now, but I’ll go and have a look in the morning.”
In true English summer style, a rainstorm rages all night and, in the morning, apparently all that remains of the two notes are soggy fragments of damp and shredded paper. “They have dissolved, I’m afraid, and are completely unreadable,” updates Mum. “What on earth are we going to do?” Precisely nothing, is my response.
“Perhaps they’ll think it’s an abandoned vehicle and call the police about it,” she says unsurely. “So, let them call the police,” I say cheerfully. “It’s taxed until April 2018. What are the police going to do? Nothing.”
Even when the Lightweight is harmlessly parked up by the roadside, it is still managing to cause trouble, but together we stand united in this ongoing battle to preserve parking rights for the poor plebeians who can’t afford a luxurious detached property with its own driveway, here on the so-called English Riviera. But, just in case, perhaps now is the time to invest in one of those stickers I once saw on another tatty old Lightweight in London declaring: “This is not an abandoned vehicle.”