Calm down, take your parking ticket with good grace

Just who is attacking all the traffic wardens? Last week, The Courier managed to get hold of figures for the number of parking enforcement staff accosted, physically or verbally, in Tayside and Fife, and the total of 177 incidents was appalling. The period of record-keeping varied, but reporter Paul Malik’s freedom of information request revealed, for example, 89 assaults in Dundee alone since 2013, and all of the other council areas reported abuse too.

Let’s agree right now that we should characterise the people who did these things as idiots. Angry idiots, perhaps, but idiots just the same.

Look, anyone who doesn’t believe in road rage needs to get out more. Sometimes I’ll see newspaper thinkpieces where somebody argues that anger is anger and frustration is frustration, and the roads part is incidental.

Nope. I’m not with you there. I’d suggest only the saintly or the stupid can remain calm at all times when driving.

And it’s only a matter of time before we show our worst side when trapped in a jam, cut up at a roundabout or injured in a costly crash.

Getting a ticket is a special kind of horror. You’re struggling back to your car, five minutes late thanks to the queue to buy some overpriced fat-and-flour nightmare masquerading as 21st-Century food, and dammit there’s Blakey from On The Buses sticking something on the windscreen.

And how do I afford that this month and what does it cost now? How much? I can’t believe it, oh no. And so on. It’s hard to cope. But there’s a standard of behaviour. I’m all for a good old emote at the right times, but don’t swing for somebody who’s just at their work.

Even the most officious traffic warden (or whatever they call them now) has a role to play and has bills to pay.

Without parking restrictions, there would be no order, and that’s worse.

I’m not pretending society would break down, but without road rules Courier Country would become Italy with rain, and nobody wants that.

Calm down and take your ticket, and next time do better

Getting a ticket is a special kind of horror