traffic wardens

I've never been a big fan of traffic wardens. There can't be many children out there who think..."one day I want to be a traffic warden" - or if there are I've yet to meet them. I'm not going to bore you with all the details - but my beloved wife and my parents have both received parking tickets this week - and both have had valid tickets displayed.

In Catrin's case - she had 2 tickets on her dashboard - and the warden only noticed the first expired one. Innocent mistake perhaps. It shall be contested.

The one today was even more ridiculous. We have permits outside our flat. I have bought a book for visitors for permit holders. Tickets were carefully filled in this morning - making sure that we had the right day, date and year as well as time. Or so we thought. Apparantly when you are staying all day - you are supposed to put one time (the start) - i.e.8.30 for all 6 tickets (which last 90 minutes each - and therefore cover until 5.30 when the permits apply). What we did was to put the times in that each ticket lasted (i.e. 8.30, 10.00, 11.30, 1.00, 2.30, 4.00). This is incorrect - and even though we have bought the tickets and displayed the tickets - we have a £30 (or even a £60) fine.

Fucking stupid. (sorry for that bit of bad language - but we are rather pissed at them). Had we removed each expired ticket every hour and a half - we'd have been ok and not received a fine. There is a lesson here somewhere- and that is that the council is run by a bunch of moronic, money grabbing tossers.

The other excitement of the day was one again nearly losing "Lamby" (no not Botham's friend) but Grace's dearest toy that she's had from birth in John Lewis. Grace was really quite upset (probably helped by my anger at her droppng it) - but after about 20 minutes of looking, praying and asking, we had discovered that it had been found and handed in. Grace was almost as relieved as I was - but the day would get worse when dad would atke a closer inspection of their car. Faith in humanity oce again put to question.