Always the National Trust sticker. It feels like every time a car parks across the gateway to my horses’ field there is a National Trust sticker in the windscreen.
Sometimes there are several stickers in varied colours, the permits of different years, one above the other, like a star rating system for lefties. A few weeks ago, a shiny black car with five National Trust stickers parked sideways on, blocking not only the gateway but the stile beside it so people couldn’t access the footpath.
When I caught up with the two men who got out of the car, asking them to please go back and move, they were, in very posh voices, extremely rude to me.
‘No, no! We have parked in a parking space, thank you!’ said one of them, patronisingly. And he waved his hand in the air to dismiss me as they walked on. ‘It’s not a parking space,’ I said. ‘It’s a farm entrance with a sign saying access for stock owners only. You have parked on private land across a footpath, blocking the stile.’
The second man then shouted: ‘No! There definitely was not a stile!’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Have it your way. There is no stile. I have been imagining that. But the farmer will be coming with a muck trailer any minute and if you don’t move your car he will tow it away.’
Both men then harrumphed and said they supposed they would have to walk the 100 yards back to the gate, which was very inconvenient. When I asked out of interest why they had come down a no entry road and mistaken a farm entrance for public parking in the first place they said ‘Google’ had told them to do it. There are all these maps and walkers’ apps, you see, and they tell people to just keep going, much like the sat-navs tell lorries to drive through the front walls of houses.
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