Childishly, fatuously, I used to play a little game with Lambeth Council that saved me £20 a year.
The game went like this: every time my residential parking permit was up for renewal, I used to not renew it for a month, during which time I would park my car five streets away where the parking was free.
I called this Parking Freedom Month. The first day of Parking Freedom Month was a lot like tax freedom day, when you start working for yourself, and stop working for the taxman. The only difference was, Parking Freedom Month only applied to me, because I could never persuade anyone else in my street to do it.
Maybe that was not so surprising. It was an awful lot of bother, not parking outside my house and driving every night to a street ten minutes’ walk from my house, just to get one over on the council. But I really enjoyed doing it, because I felt as if I was, in my own sad way, defeating the loons and their thieving ‘emissions’ permits.
The month I spent not paying, I rationalised tragically, meant that my yearly parking charges were reduced by 8.3 (recurring) per cent and the best part was that Lambeth was powerless to stop me. It could not force me to park outside my own house. If I wanted to trudge from the outskirts of Streatham back to my home in Balham in the dark every night, there wasn’t a thing it could do about it. This is what passes for feeling empowered nowadays.
I wasn’t all that confident, however. I thought about sending the leader of the council a letter informing him of the action I was taking, but didn’t because I couldn’t be sure he would not react by making the whole of Streatham a controlled parking zone, just to clamp down on me.
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