Want us all to be kind again? You’ll pay for it
Wee really have gone to the dogs
We are all enjoying wonderful moments of becoming social again.
I’d forgotten some of the joys of sitting in a café, so on Thursday I was next to a family with a little excited dog. A boy of about seven said “Mummy, the dog’s done a wee”.
“Oh yes darling, he has,” said his mum, and they left, leaving the waitress to mop it up with a sponge.
This is the sort of thing we’ve all been missing from our lives.
For three months this poor family must have been asking random strangers to look at their dog’s wee on Zoom, which is better than nothing but never as enjoyable as the real thing. It’s so good to get back to normal.
The Government seems keen for us to celebrate the easing of lockdown rules. One thing it is introducing, to bring out a feelgood jollity for the summer, is scrapping free parking permits for hospital staff.
This is what we needed to bring us back to life. Because if one group has had it easy during the last few months it’s hospital staff, so it’s about time they made a contribution.
Why should the taxpayer fork out so that nurses can park for free before enjoying a day mopping up puddles of wee?
Hopefully by August they’ll have to pay for their own uniforms as well. Some people pay £28 for one of them at a fetish shop, why should NHS staff be given them free?
Many people have pointed out how medical staff were considered heroes during the lockdown, so we should think about those Thursday nights when we all clapped them. This seems fair – which is why we should send nurses a bill for all the saucepans that were damaged by being whacked with spoons.
Some medical staff have never had the luxury of free parking before, so why let them get away with it now?
In the Bible the book of John tells us: “Jesus laid his hands upon the man who was lame, and lo the man stood upon his feet and began to walk. ‘Hang on’, said Jesus, ‘I need a Scheckel for the meter’ for his donkey was in the car park. And the man did collapse again but the taxpayer didn’t have to fund the parking of Jesus and that’s the main thing’.
This attitude, that medical staff can’t expect to park for free, must be encouraged. There should be an episode of Casualty in which a paragliding accident leaves an old man seriously injured in the Lake District.
Medics arrive to find him screaming, ‘Aaaaaagh, me back, aaaaaagh’. Then we follow the gripping story of the driver trying to get change for the meter.
He’s only got a £20 note so he queues up for an ice cream to get some pound coins, and it’s touch and go whether he gets them before the warden arrives.
At Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in South London, the car park charge is £77 for a day. So if you park for an operation and have to stay in for a while, you’ll have to ask the surgeon to take a kidney out as well so you can sell it to an illegal organ trading racket in Cambodia to pay the car park charges.
Next we should charge firefighters for the petrol they use on the way to fires. And the water they use should be on a meter, then they might not be so wasteful. And if traffic wardens could clamp engines, the Fire Brigade would have an incentive to work a bit quicker.
Then ambulance drivers should get speeding tickets.
They shouldn’t be allowed all the fun of screeching past traffic with a siren wailing, while their mate in the back mucks about with a defibrillator, if they’re not prepared to pay for it.
This is all a sign of how the lockdown has made us into a kinder, more caring society.
Rapper Kanye West has announced he’s standing for US President. Some people are worried he will split the anti-Trump vote, but that’s to forget that everything is different now. More likely is that next January he’s President West, making an acceptance speech that goes: “I’m in charge of the law, and the dollar and war, and I’m the only one more crazy than the President before.”