Sunday 2 April 2017

Parking puzzle

Up early on this bright sunny Passion Sunday morning, walking down to St John's Canton to celebrate the eight o'clock Eucharist with ordinand Sam and three others. I picked up nine items of litter in transit, and there were more that were too wet to handle, still drying from overnight rain. There's always more.

Then, on after breakfast to St German's for the Solemn Mass. Numbers were down there as well, but we did welcome a visitor from Germany who comes over at least once a year to stay with friends and joins us for worship. With the sun flooding the building with bright morning light, leading worship was particularly uplifting.

Feeling rather tired after lunch, following yesterday's workshop and walk, I went by car to the coach station in Sophia Gardens to buy a coach ticket for tomorrow's trip to London to see sister June. I found a parking space easily, and was stopped by a puzzled visiting motorist querying if the Pay 'n Display parking regime extended to the road outside the enclosed car park. I couldn't see a notice nearby. It was only when I walked fifty metres towards the ticket office that I saw one.

I hadn't seen the ticket machine serving this zone as it was located across the road and inside a bus-only lane leading into the coach parking and passenger pick up area. A rather unsafe location for pedestrians, to say the least. It was thirty metres away from the zone it served, and from afar it was hard to determine its purpose with no accompanying sign board or information panel. It looked like it had been put there as an afterthought, or was a job abandoned half complete. By the time I'd fully taken this in, I reached the booking office, and as there wasn't a queue, I was back in my car and driving out, in the same amount of time as it would have taken me to get a ticket from a machine in the car park.

The rest of the day we spent at home, quiet and uneventful except for another remarkable episode of 'Line of Duty' which boasted a twelve minute police interrogation sequence, economical in movement and camera angles, with continuous dialogue, possibly shot entirely in one take, producing a peculiarly intense and claustrophobic atmosphere, like a stage performance. Great telly.
  

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