It’s hard to save the planet when you live on my road
Idon’t know about you but I’m finding it increasingly hard to live my best life. But cutting down on red meat, axing booze and eating my body weight in fibre every day is a cinch compared to reducing my husband’s emissions.
No, not those emissions! One of his mates has checked and freedom to emit definitely constitutes a human right – as long as the window is open.
I’m talking about the car. The pressure’s on to ditch conventional vehicles for the sake of the planet and generations of children forced to breath toxic air in our cities. Here in London, the pioneering Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) will come into force on April 9 – and while it’s entirely laudable, it’s every bit as stringent as it sounds.
In addition to the daily £11.50 congestion charge, which operates between 7am to 6pm Monday to Friday, motorists in central London whose cars are deemed too polluting will have to pay the ULEZ charge of £12.50, which will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
By the middle of the century we’ll all be driving nonpolluting electric cars and/or wearing jet packs fuelled by environmental virtue, but until
there are enough plugs to go around, the most sensible (affordable) idea for now is for us to invest in a hybrid car.
Quite a few of my neighbours have and a fleet of Prius motors are parked in the road. Except they aren’t going anywhere.
Why? Because the other week a big motor with tinted windows turned up in broad daylight. Two men jumped out, one swiftly jacked up the front of the Prius and the other used an angle grinder to snip off the catalytic converter, which cleans the car’s toxic gases. Then they moved on to the next car. Five minutes it took. Bish-bash-bosh and off they went. It was so brazen that a neighbour assumed they were garage mechanics on a call-out.
The thieves want the rhodium, palladium and platinum; rhodium commands prices of up to £2,000 an ounce, twice the value of gold.
So what to do? We can either ditch the car completely or take the Seventies approach and leave the children in it all evening with a Panda Pop and bag of crisps each.
Oh look, my husband’s just left for the corner shop…