The anthology progresses. I have many emails to answer. I’ll get to them. it does seem that my idea of becoming a publisher could be one of my better ones and might actually work. There will be some financial outlay at first but nothing ventured, nothing gained as one of the forgotten sayings goes.
‘Fine words butter no parsnips’ was another one. Today I met someone who instantly got the ‘There’s been a milk spill’ – ‘Well there’s no use crying over it’ rejoinder. There is hope in the Local Shop staff yet. She’ll never be made manager though. Far too intelligent and normal.
Oh, I should add, no fanfiction. That’s where you take someone else’s copyrighted characters and make a story about them. And no slash fiction, no homoerotic fantasies about Kirk and Spock or Rimmer and Lister, that sort of thing. Even if they already did it.
None of that has yet appeared in my inbox. It’s a pre-emptive strike on my part.
True stories are okay if fictionalised. I have one I am pondering. I’m not Private Eye and can’t fight a libel case. It’s a good one and might be fixable.
But I digress. As you would expect.
There is moaning about parking on pavements. In Scotland it is actually illegal for your tyres to hit the kerb at any time because it means you’re a shit driver. I never heard of it being enforced but I have heard of warnings .
But yeah. If you have no room to park, don’t park there. It’s not that hard to work out.
Owning a car does not make you God. I have one and I leave it where it is safe and legal to leave it and not in anyone else’s way. It just seems the polite way to behave.
Parking on the pavement lets the traffic flow, sure, but what about pedestrians? You let your driving mates through but you say fuck the walkers. Is that how you want to be thought of?
Cars live on the road, not the pavement. They are separated spaces for a reason.
I think fines for being a self important arse are pretty much justified.
underdogs bite upwards 
There’s a youth gang movement over in Russia that targets drivers who breech regulations like pavement parking or cross-walk blocking. A group of them will politely ask the driver to remedy the problem. If the driver does not cooperate they proceed to plaster the driver’s side of the front windshield with a half-meter diameter almost-impossible-to-remove big round sticky poster noting something about the driver being an inconsiderate law-breaker or somesuch. If anyone has seen and remembers the name of the group, please post it here… I’ve lost track of it and they have a number of VERY entertaining YouTube videos!
:>
MJM
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Treatment of an inconsiderate guy’s car, parked in a disabled bay:
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LOL! Different style… same idea.
:>
MJM
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“Stop a douchebag”
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Justinsunshine! YES! That’s it! Look them up on YouTube and you will find at least a dozen videos of them doing stuff like that!
– MJM
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In my area the streets are all terraced houses, with virtually no off-road parking. There are slightly fewer parking spaces than houses. It’s a game of “musical chairs”.
There is also a high proportion of people who have a car, but don’t go to work. They can always get parked.
So can the second cars of people who seldom use them.
Those who work late, are the ones who struggle to park when they get home.
The streets are narrow, everyone parks on the pavement.
If that becomes illegal, the number of usable spaces will be at least halved.
We struggle to manage as it is. We don’t need new well-meaning regulations from smug outsiders who would be unaffected by their interference, thank you.
To put it more succinctly, Fcuk off and mind your own business.
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No people in wheelchairs,on mobility scooters or pushing a pram in your area?I’ve seen invalids totally stopped by inconsiderate pavement parkers and would like to see a regime where a phone call would instantly summon a tow truck to remove the obstruction.
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No wheelchairs, one moby scooter, several prams. We know our neighbours. There is enough room.
I don’t expect Traffic Wardens to use their judgement, do you? They are not local, they are just out-of-town small-minded parasites, earning their living by blindly serving our “Masters”.
We have one neighbour, who does have off-road parking, who delights in reporting parking “offences”. This law would please him enormously. It would also please the Traffic Wardens, and all those who profit financially by preying on us.
Campaign for what your area needs, by all means.
Leave us out of it, please.
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“Out of town small minded parasites”? Ahem. I used to work the streets I lived on. As a Traffic Warden.
My neighbours knew who I was and what I did for a living, and knew I worked for them more than my council house ‘masters’ whose majority revenue comes from off street parking rather than on street. So it was with most of my workmates. Only four of our crew lived out of town.
Do the arithmetic. A good average would be five hundred parking spaces per town at fifty pence an hour out of a maximum of a thousand spaces overall, twelve four hours a day, actually helping subsidise your council tax. An enforcing officer, six people per shift, two overlapping shifts every twelve hours, seven days a week, can issue between zero and nine tickets a day on average, half of which won’t get paid. The other half get paid within the discounted period of two weeks.
All to prevent the inconsiderate bastards whose antics force women with children in prams into the roadway, block lines of sight on corners, block bus stops and taxi ranks, take up disabled bays or decide they need to block half a street because they can’t be bothered to walk a hundred yards to the curry house. Then threaten the enforcing officer when he does his or her job and gets them to move on or has to issue a ticket. Now, Zaphod me old china; tell me who the real ‘parasites’ are?
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What we have now is sensible enforcement. If a vehicle has two wheels on the pavement but there is still room for scooters to pass it is not a problem and it improves traffic flow. That will disappear as councils hand out contracts to private firms who will have a financial interest in issuing as many penalties as possible.
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But the real money is made off the car parks. That was my point. If people knew anything about the penalty enforcement process, they’d find parking fine revenue rarely breaks even, and often makes a loss. It’s one of those urban myth type thingies.
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Breaking even doesn’t matter, the Council has plenty of our money already, and can always take more..
The parasites are all those drones who get paid a wage to take money by force and cause untold inconvenience to those who pay those wages. Not much of a product, is it? They serve little purpose except their own. And there are thousands of them.
I can understand why they choose to believe that they perform a “service” to some pedestrians who might otherwise be mildly inconvenienced. But they completely dismiss the cost of their actions to drivers, the ones who overwhelmingly pay for the roads.
Ah, but rules are rules. Rules must be obeyed. Let’s have more rules! They help us to punish those inclined to be disobedient! Let’s pretend that the rules are all good, always! All rule-breakers are bad, by definition!
Maybe Bill Stickers carefully used his judgement when giving tickets, rather than blindly following the rules? But even so, he will be aware that many of his ilk are a disgrace to that noble profession of public guardians.
I have fought and beaten 36 consecutive parking tickets. Clearly, the Traffic Wardens and their masters do not follow the rules, or I wouldn’t keep winning. Learn and follow your own rules, parasites!
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I’m proud to say I have never gotten a speeding ticket OR a parking ticket in my entire life!
(Of course I’ve never driven a car, but hey, why take a chance on spoiling my perfect record, eh?)
;>
MJM
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I live in a block of 10 flats with room for maybe 4 cars outside, in a town that was mostly built before cars were invented. Parking is a pain, I’m often parked way down the street and sometimes in the pub car park at the end of the street.
It is a problem. Most of the country now has more cars than spaces, but nobody parks on the pavement here. I think because it’s already illegal in Scotland.
The solution should be to create car parking spaces, but that would be too sensible 😉 What we have is congestion.
My solution, currently in operation, is to look for somewhere new to live 😉
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And for the rest of us, please do make sure you can smoke in it.
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My fave is: “If we’re treading on thin ice, we may as well dance.”
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Even some legal on-road parkers can be a PITA.
It’s not unusual for a car to be parked on one side of a road, then a visitor or resident from the other side of the road parks right opposite it, even though there are clear spaces behind or ahead of the original one. In doing so, other two-way traffic now has to alternately stop at the pinch point.
It wouldn’t be so bad if only Mr/Mrs Inconsiderate’s car ran the risk of its side-mirror getting broken, but Mr/Mrs Innocent’s has the same 50/50 risk.
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“I think fines for being a self important arse are pretty much justified.”
Years ago I went to watch a rally at Elibank near Peebles. The approach to the stage was narrow but idiots parked there anyway. The arrival of Donald Heggie in a Mk 2 Escort with big sticky-out wheel arches was announced by bump bump bump bump as he clipped most of them. Laugh? We nearly wet ourselves.
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In Southport, many of the residential roads were built when cars were mostly Austin-7s, and not many of those either. Today, cars are at least a good foot wider than then. It’s not because people are much bigger, but because of all the chobham-armour and window-motors and other stuff in the doors.
If we didn’t park partly on the pavements (and many of the roads do also have terraced-houses with not much front garden – it’s a typical grand old Victorian seaside town) all traffic would be single-file all the time. Many people have in fact converted their front yards into car spaces, which means there’s even less linear street parking as you have to have a good entry/exit line.
On the roads in Birkdale and Hillside, which contain mainly 10-bedroom mansions, there’s plenty of room as (a) the roadways are all enormously wide, so all parking can be done on the roadway, and (b) the six cars owned by each household are inside on their carriage-sweep. I expect it’s these ones who’ll be supporting the Council in banning on-pavement parking throughout Sefton MBC. And they all belong to the expensive local golf-clubs…and these are _really_ expensive (look them up… there’s no price even quoted on the Royal Birkdale’s website…)
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With the 4x4s and people carriers, the parking bays in supermarkets are no longer wide enough.
Then there’s the grown up kids who can’t afford a house but can afford a car, so one space outside the house isn’t enough.
There are tenements all over Scotland, whole streets of blocks of six flats each, room for maybe two cars outside each block…
And nobody wants to build parking areas for residents. It’s going to get worse.
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I’m afraid you’re right.
We also have a BritishPolitical-Enemyclass that would like “the masses” to walk, cycle, go by bus or train, everywhere, under what they like to call “A fully-Integrated Transport Policy”, that “is Green, saves fuel and resources” (for whom, I might ask?) and encourages “Fitness and Health”.
Yet they fly by paraffin-jet to climate change conferences.
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500 commercial jet airliner take offs produce roughly the same amount on NOx air pollutants as 10 billion cigarettes. So one take off produces about the same as 20 million cigarettes. That’s as many cigarettes as a pack a day smoker would smoke in 3,000 years.
A private jet, during a full flight, probably produces at least 1/10th of what a commercial jet produces during take off, so that means every time Al Gore takes a private jet to a climate conference he’s produced as much pollution, all on his own, as 300 smokers would during their entire lifetimes!
Thanks Al Gore!
– MJM
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In many areas of London and probably elsewhere in England too, councils (mostly Labour but also LibDem andTory) have decided to take it upon themselves to ‘discourage’ car use in order to ‘save the planet’. They refuse planning permission for developments that they believe have too many parking spaces. One per dwelling is considered too far many. They then charge a fortune (over a hundred pounds) for resident’s parking permits. Even with a permit, people often have to park half a mile or more from home. And as for visitors, forget it.
So parking is a massive problem and is getting worse because of these a’holes. Many roads are very narrow but with wide pavements. Putting a couple of wheels on the pavement can help traffic flow and is especially useful if you need to stop for a very brief time. CCTV cameras are making that a bigger problem too. Pub car parks are out of the question partly because most have gone as a result of the smoking ban and because those that remain tend not to have off road parking anyway.
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The pub car park is doomed. With the new Scottish driving limit, you cannot drive after one pub measure. So new pubs won’t need parking facilities (new pubs – as if!) and old pubs will sell off the land they use for theirs.
Soon, restaurants too. A glass of wine with a meal and you’re over the limit.
Either public transport gets to be cheap, reliable and frequent or pubs and restaurants will be legends we tell to the grandchildren. And at my age, that’s within the next ten years.
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Drivers, like smokers, are an acceptable group to hate on. Just hit the right buttons and out come the closet authoritarians who will gleefully photograph ‘offenders’ for the sheer pleasure of snitching to bring meaning to their worthless lives or to settle scores with a neighbour. It is going to be very sad to watch the busybodies and prod-noses further empowered. The depressing thing is that many of them will be smokers.
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Bugger all to do with parking problems. From that article ” Government looks to create a ‘walking and cycling nation’.” so with that implemented the only cars will be the Zils of the politburo sweeping down streets full of walkers and buses the occupants of such conveyances will be as dead as the walkers…get it? Here’s a clue Rick shoots them in the head,
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