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Occasionally it has to be admitted that the Council does something right for a change.
The paddling pool in Clissold Park got filled with water at the very start of summer, and the Christmas lights (sorry, I mean the Seasonal Non-Denominational Decorative Illuminations) look very nice up and down Church St and the High St… But I still haven’t forgiven them for the parking round Church St. It was all so unnecessary.
There’s a famous Indian economist who says that all famines are man-made; the results of bad politicians rather than bad harvests. The parking zones are an illustration of this in miniature. Little signs everywhere for different times and different types of permit. Our £320 business permit, for instance, is good for Permits Only bays (of which there are very few) but not for Residents Permits (of which there are millions.) People with the wrong sort of permit are driving endlessly round empty Residents bays - which are all empty because the Residents are off driving round some other borough, trying to find a place to park near their place of work. It’s a parking famine caused by the arbitrary decisions of an ignorant ruling body. Lucky they’re not organising a food famine. Having rushed this mess through it will now take Hackney 18 months to examine its effects in the real world before it can make any adjustments. (Lack of manpower, apparently: no-one available at present to stroll round with a clipboard and notice the bleeding obvious. Why can you never find a sociology student when you need one?)
If you work for the Council, however, none of this need affect you. The Wilmer Place car park by Fresh and Wild will, when fully renovated, have 32 places. This is the best hope for any customer in a car who wants to shop on Church Street. The Town Hall, on the other hand, takes up to sixty cars for Council workers. It’s close-packed, like a scrapyard. Council workers smoke fags on the pavement with the guilty and defiant expressions of people who are going to fight to the death to defend an un-earned privilege. To forestall hostile criticism, little square signs have appeared on the bollards behind, explaining that these spaces are reserved for holders of Emergency Services Permits. Strangely enough the only permits on display are for Hackney Landlord Services.
This sounds so exciting that I’m working on a TV series: Hackney Emergency Landlord Services.
Scene 1. Council Flat. Interior.
- We’s a bit behind on the rent, innit Babes?
- Don’t worry darlin’. Here comes the Emergency Landlord Services…
- (FX Siren approaching)
- We is so glad you came; we thought we was going to have to evict ourselves. - Do not worry. That is what we are paid for… I think… OK, just a few questions about your Ethnicity Quotient and Social Preference Profiles, and then we can start to fill out the forms.
There was a thin sprinkling of frost on the roof this morning. We’ve been selling Statement Coats for a month now but it looks like it might be time to get the real winter ones up from the basement. I just saw a girl in Allens Gardens wearing a pink tweed number we put out on Saturday. She looked happy, which is nice, because we always like our clothes to go to good homes, and we try to follow up important sales with an at-home visit to see how they’re settling in. (Providing we can find a sociologist to carry out a survey, of course.)
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