Grumpy Oldie Man

The collision was nothing. Renewing my parking permit was agony

Given that the source of the vexation outlined below was a single bus for which I failed to wait at all, it feels ironic that Oldie articles about Hammersmith and Fulham’s parking permits department cleave to that tired public transport metaphor. You wait a very long time for one, and then two of them…

Mark Palmer makes his submission on page 69, and compelling it is. Mine begins in Salisbury on a drizzly evening last October, in the pre-novichok age of innocence, when the size and rapture of the crowd of spectators established a juicy road traffic accident as the most sensational event the town could expect to host.

The fault was mine for ignoring the white lines at the end of a side road which may, with hindsight, have constituted a request to stop. No scintilla of blame attached to the driver of the doubledecker which smashed into my ancient Audi A3, ending its life with 150,000 miles on the clock, and very nearly mine.

Ordinarily, I’d have been overjoyed when the breathalyser offered by the pleasant young copper recorded the unlikely reading of 0.00 mg of alcohol. But coming within inches of being crushed by a two-storey conveyance isn’t as much fun as it must sound, and I was in too great an ague for smug satisfaction.

I was also too shaky to avoid what would prove another driving-related error when I replaced the car the following month.

Before we go on, let me record my affection for the good folk at H&F parking permits. Once, my brother-inlaw brought his friend Simon, a department member, to ours for a Dj-themed dinner at which the guests of honour, for reasons into which we need not delve, were Pete Murray and Diddy David Hamilton. Simon was an absolute sweetie. There’s no reason to imagine his brethren are otherwise, and the guy who answered when I rang about a permit for the new car couldn’t have been more helpful.

‘All you need to do,’ he explained, ‘is bring in the old permit, the V5C document for the new…’

‘Sorry,’ I interrupted, ‘but I left the old permit in the old car, which has been scrapped. I was a bit traumatised and didn’t think to remove it.’

‘That’s understandable – you must have been in a right state,’ he consoled.

‘I was. So what do I do to get a new permit?’

‘You’ll need the V5C form,’ he said. ‘And the old permit.’ ‘If you could hold for a moment.’ I’d put the call on speaker for the benefit of a son whose delight in his father’s distress was visibly growing in inverse proportion to the shrinkage of my patience. Unbidden, he fetched a tumbler and a bottle of Johnny Walker (Red Label) with a dozen or so shots left in it. I poured and drained in the one fluid movement. ‘Are you still there?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, as I hoped I’d made fairly clear, I don’t have the old permit. It was in the car when it was destroyed.’ ‘I understand that.’ ‘So what do I need to get a replacement?’

‘The V5C form from the DVLA, and proof that you’re the council-taxpayer.’ ‘Those I have. Anything else?’ ‘Yes. We’ll need the old permit.’ ‘Not to belabour the point,’ I resumed, having replenished and deplenished the glass, ‘but I cannot bring you the old permit. It no longer exists in this physical realm.’

‘I see. But we will need the old permit to issue a new one.’

‘Jesus, this is worse than the f****** accident. Look, I’m not in the mood to recite the whole Dead Parrot Sketch but please, please, I am begging you to accept that the old permit has ceased to be. It is buried irretrievably inside a dense cube of crushed metal.’

‘Are you saying,’ he mused, ‘that you don’t have the old permit?’

I fell silent for the few seconds my son required to fetch a fresh bottle.

‘That is what I am saying. Now how do we get around this problem?’

I can’t recall each of the various stages he detailed as essential, though they certainly involved a written declaration signed by a solicitor, and probably some DNA testing.

Whatever they were, they were too demanding to contemplate and, for a month, I have either left the car on my parents’ driveway an hour away by bus, or more often paid the daily fee to park outside my house. I could have bought three Maseratis and had change for an Apache helicopter.

All things end, however, and, in a few weeks, the old permit becomes obsolete. So yesterday I rang parking permits about replacing it. A different voice was quick to comprehend the situation.

‘Just to be crystal clear,’ he recapped, ‘you totalled your old car, which was scrapped with the old permit inside, and you want to know what documents we’ll need to issue a permit for the new one when the previous permit expires?’

‘Yes, yes. God spare your bones for grasping it.’

‘OK. Do you have the V5C ownership form?’

‘I do. And proof that I’m the counciltaxpayer.’ ‘Actually, we can do that here.’ ‘So that’s it? I can come in for the new permit?’

‘You can. Oh, just one more thing. You’ll also need the…’

Before I had clicked ‘end call’, a grinning son was unscrewing the cap on a fresh bottle of Johnny Red.