DIARY
VICKI WOODS Lke my neighbour the Princess Royal, I have the use of a flat in Dolphin Square during the week. I don't enjoy staying there because I like to wake up where I keep my underwear, but I'm not very keen on Bas- ingstoke carpark late at night. So some- times I stay over when I hadn't planned to. Unexpectedly. On a whim. You'd think that British Rail could cope with this sort of commuter contingency. But they cannot, and ill betide the passenger who avails him- self of the offer of a bed for the night in town. Station carparks have been privatised and they no longer belong to British Rail. They belong to parking companies. You pay as you enter. A day-ticket costs some piddling sum — £1.50 in the case of Bas- ingstoke — and you return each evening, as good commuters should, to take your car away before its day-ticket runs out. If you are a bad or immoral or impetuous com- muter and leave your car overnight, one of three things happens to it: one, robbery; two, vandalism; three, clamping.
Basingstoke carpark is long and narrow and badly lit. It's up a steepish incline, and it takes a woman ten minutes to detrain in high heels and walk to her car down the dimly lit underpass and up again, carrying her portable personal computer, handbag, mac, briefcase full of glossy magazines, roomy Gianni Versace carrier-bag contain- ing dry-cleaning, and car-keys hooked over her right hand in the approved self-defence mode, to poke the eyes out of any bogey- man who might think of jumping on her amid the encircling gloom. Last week, I plodded up towards my car, which I could see from half a mile away, as steady rain fell. I crunched through the neat piles of glass that glisten all over the carpark from smashed quarter-lights. When I reached my car, it had been clamped. The notice said `Call this number', and indicated that there might be a two-hour wait. The nearest tele- phone is back at the station. A departing commuter leaned out of his car and offered me his portable. Weeping into it and putting lots of tremulous vibrato into my voice, I asked the car-dampers to come and unclamp it. I said there were children Home Alone. I didn't say they were nearly 16. I said I was wet. I said I was frightened to be left in this howling urban wasteland at this time of night without a car. The good Samaritan was quite taken in and offered to stay, but I explained that the speech was for effect, so the dampers would put a dou- ble shuffle on. The dampers asked how I was going to pay. Anything, I said: Amex, Mastercard, cheques, cash, even. Two hours later, in monsoon rain, they arrived, saying they'd had to unclamp a lady first because she was 'hysterical'. `That was me!' I said. `I'm hysterical.' No, said the clam- pers, she was in her old man's car and he needed it back; he was going ballistic and giving her hell on her carphone, so she was doing her ends, not to mention the bloke, of course, so she'd had to be rescued as a priority. How was I going to pay?
Iasked British Rail how to avoid getting clamped again. They said why didn't I come back each night on my return ticket, so as to pick the car up? I could think of a few louche reasons why not. Clearly, so could they. Inspiration lent me a lie. I said, 'My old man won't let me. Sometimes he makes me stay in London with him.' Sympathy knitted British Rail's brow and they won- dered if I perhaps had a friend who could drive to Basingstoke with a spare car-key and £1.50 to put a ticket on it for me. 'We get this all the time,' said the station man- ager's office. `Commuters ringing us up, begging us to put a ticket on the car . . . It's not British Rail's carpark. It doesn't have anything to do with us.' My neigh- bour, the headhunter, is a smart cookie and tipped me off at the weekend. He buys two parking tickets daily as a matter of course, and leaves a yellowing handwritten note on the windscreen explaining that today's tick- et was paid for yesterday. So he only gets clamped when he's fog-bound in Frankfurt for two days. Unexpectedly. On a whim.
We moved to the country years ago, before I understood what 'equity' meant or that my house was 'equity' (and long before I began to borrow money on it and turn it into 'negative equity'). We have always worked in London and travelled up daily, 'You're looking good.' sometimes by car and sometimes by train. Whenever I travel by car, a faint bell rings in my head. A hippyish sort of a bell, like a cow-bell, or a little Indian brass bell; the sort of bell I used to wear to work, unbe- lievably, along with my tie-dye work-shirt and patched flares. It tinkles guilt, this hippy bell. I feel guilty in a car, because I know I'm selfishly using up more than my share of the delicate and limited resources of Planet Earth. I ought to be travelling to work on an integrated public transport sys- tem, according to the precepts of Dave Wetzel, who used to be i/c Transport in Red Ken Livingstone's long-departed GLC. We all know what happened to Red Ken, but where is Mr Wetzel now? I liked him. His transport policy made an impression on me. People drive into London daily, he said, from places as far away as Reading (I live 20 miles further out than Reading), and they clog up London's roads and Lon- don's parking spaces. They should be made to come by train, he said (he might have said 'encouraged' to come by train, but I remember Mr Wetzel as a bit of a bossy- boots). They should park their cars at the station, he said, use their season tickets on British Rail and buy a flat-fare ZoneCross- er or whatever it was to use on London Transport. Think of that. Flat fares. Inte- grated transport systems. 0 my Wetzels and my Red Kens long ago!
The Mayor of Basingstoke posted me his magazine last week called Outlook, 'for the people and businesses of Basingstoke and Deane'. In it, he points up various mayoral landmarks during the coming year that ratepayers can join him in celebrating. 'Twinning,' he writes, 'features very strong- ly, with the 10th anniversary of our friend- ship with Braine L'Alleud and the 25th anniversary of our association with Alengon.' Call me an insular Europhobe who's only just noticed that Alengon is en route to the Le Havre ferry terminal, but has anybody out there heard of Braine L'Alleud? His Worship ploughs on, 'In September we are entertaining Euskirchen in a sports weekend' (pass me that map of United Germany), and finishes, 'Our twin- ning is flourishing so well in fact that the Council of Europe has awarded us a Euro- pean Diploma.' For this I'm in Band G, and they're suing me for £37 in unpaid poll tax. But I have decided to forgive the mayor his twinning lunacies, because Outlook's lead story is a spirited call for the banning of wheel-dampers. They are 'rapidly getting a worse name for themselves than time-share salesmen. There have been cases of jew- ellery or even children left behind as securi- ty before the clamped driver can go in search of cash.'
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