Now I consider myself to be a pretty fair-minded person so why is it that I am tormented by parking spaces. I visited a lower-end supermarket the other day, just for the cashpoint obviously as I don’t eat cheap pizza. The bloody car park was absolutely rammed.
But as I drove round for the third time watching a number of oversize posteriors bent over a vehicle either loading bags of quick meal stodge into the boot or trying to squash the sixth kid into the rear of a Citroen Xsara Picasso, I notice there are at least 7 spaces at the back of the compound. However, you can only park here if you want ‘Car wash mister?’
There was one car being hosed down with five or six former KGB officers armed with Chamois leathers chatting and looking generally menacing. Their other six parking places were unoccupied and I for one was not going dump my car there and tell them to get stuffed. On the fourth drive round I noticed the other free spaces.
Call me old fashioned but should disabled badge holders be banned from my spaces? It appears to me that in supermarkets and town centres these days that the disabled badge holders have a car parking space EACH at every service area in the towns. It must be true as have you ever seen a disabled badge holder waiting for a space like the rest of us morons. NO. Have you ever seen as group of disabled space even half filled up? NO. Why. Because Mary’s space right outside the bank is free because she is using her space outside the vets today! Aaaaaargh!.
The disabled spaces at today’s supermarket of choice are right by the bloody cashpoint too, yes, all ten of them. Now I could park in one and get to the cashpoint and back before the chav on the corner could cover the 20 yards or so and nick my iPod off the passenger seat. However before I had gotten 5 yards myself there was the expected Oi! from behind me and a man in a yellow jacket said I could not park there, as it was a disabled space.
He was not having any of my arguments that I would happily move it if ten disabled badge holders from the M reg Triumph Toledo Club turned up! I choose the Triumph Toledo Club as every blue rinse old biddy that drives at 12 mph sitting on a cushion to the supermarket once a fortnight on pension day seems to have a 36 year old Triumph of some sort with 3000 genuine from new miles on it.
Then of course there are the other ten spaces at the supermarket. With a mummy and a kiddy and a trolley painted on it. I am pretty sure that is the Egyptian Hieroglyphic for ‘The Monkey Park Here’ but once again, man in yellow jacket, he say Bog off …. You can’t park here.
Eventually after a half an hour drive round the car park that has put three miles on the car, I find a space. I wander over to the cashpoint and it is out of service. The man in the yellow jacket is leaning on the trolleys by the entrance and says to me. “Terrible that is aint it, bin broke for free days, you just can’t get any service nowadays can ya”
The only thing I could think of to say to him I will deliver in the form of a crossword clue.
Two words, seven letters, 3 F’s (4,3)
Mr. V. F. Angry
Address supplied
The Monkey is a professional photographer on a regional newspaper
Monkey is the word used in the newspaper industry to refer to a Photographer
Loading...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
The editor was sent this in response to the article:
We felt it important to put it with the piece.
Dear Ed,
The following comments should not detract from the general wonderfulness of Beat magazine, its beautiful writing and its many and varied splendours. But…
I have one major quibble with the latest edition: Monkey’s supermarket carpark rant, a staggeringly badly informed article that shows incredible ignorance about the barriers faced by disabled people.
His article reads as though it could have been written by a Daily Mail journalist, which oddly enough it could, as there was a similarly ignorant story that appeared in the Mail about three months ago, in which a reporter claimed there were “hundreds of thousands” of “prime” parking spaces left vacant in supermarkets all over the country. Why, the Mail asked? Because they had been reserved for holders of blue parking badges.
Fortunately the Mail’s website was flooded with angry disabled readers outraged at this “offensive” and “disgraceful” story. Many of them told the Mail the truth: that it was rare for them to find a free accessible space, that the accessible spaces were there for a reason and helped disabled people to live independently, and that misuse of the spaces by non-disabled people was still rife.
http://www.bhfederation.org.uk/federation-news/item/507-mail’s-parking-article-sparks-furious-response.html
So here is some information for you, Monkey, from an article I wrote about the Mail story, from one journalist to another, in the hope that you will not spread your misinformed opinions any wider:
1 Helen Smith, from the disabled motorists’ charity Mobilise, pointed out that the badge was “a lifeline” to disabled people and that her members “would not in many cases even be able to go shopping if it wasn’t for spaces close to the doors with extra width to get out”.
2 The Mail article came shortly after a survey for the Baywatch campaign found misuse of the spaces again on the rise in many supermarkets, with nearly one in four accessible spaces in Tesco carparks being used by drivers without blue badges.
(October 2007, Disability Now)
Baywatch survey: our findings
By John Pring, acting editor
Leading supermarket chains have failed to tackle the abuse of accessible parking bays, the latest Baywatch survey has shown.
The survey – the fifth since 2002 – was carried out in late July by more than 500 DN readers and members of the disability charities Mobilise and the British Polio Fellowship.
The results showed more than one in five accessible bays were being used by people without blue badges, the same levels of abuse as the last survey in 2005. For both Asda and Tesco, more than 23 per cent of their accessible bays were being abused, higher than in 2005.
3 Disabled people have been attacked – both verbally and physically – after questioning selfish motorists like Monkey who decided that it wouldn’t do any harm to park in an accessible space.
From reading his piece, I suspect that disability hate crime is another unpleasant part of our national landscape that Monkey would dismiss with an ignorant swish of his tail.
It may seem entertaining for Monkey to crank out an ‘amusing’ Mail-esque ‘rant’, taking pot shots at disabled people. But articles like his can sadly lead, bit by bit, to tragedy. They can lead to the spread of disablist attitudes in society. The families of Brent Martin, Fiona Pilkington, Michael Gilbert, Riki Judkins, Kevin Davies and many, many other victims of horrific – and still all too often under-reported – disability hate crimes are only too aware of these tragic consequences.
I hope Monkey thinks next time before he engages finger with keyboard.
Yours sincerely,
John Pring, editor, Disability News Service
(and former news editor, Slough and Windsor Observer), http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com
You must log in to post a comment.