I walked down my road yesterday morning just after nine and felt oddly disoriented. No traffic in either direction, and no parking either on the double yellows or in the 20-minute spaces. I thought maybe it was something to do with the events of last week, when people were being ticketed for parking for ten minutes in the bays, but the sexually depraved man who sells fireworks to small children and bribes traffic wardens was allowed to park on the double yellow...until the bribery was reported, a parking manager arrived and the van was towed.
I popped into Jimmy's cafe, normally heaving, but dead. Out onto Brixton Hill. Last week the traffic was stationery and bumper-to-bumper. Yesterday (and today) the occasional passing vehicle passed at thirty miles an hour.
It dawned on me. Half term.
Later, I caught the bus along Millbank. Norwegian flags flew from Millbanl Millennium Pier. Railings and traffic cones waited outside the Tate. I remembered that the King and Queen of Norway had been on Today discussing their State Visit.
Yesterday afternoon I came out of our the far side of our building after a meeting and paused to have a cigarette. I read a notice on a pay-and-display machine "This parking meter is out of order. Until it is fixed, parking is free. Please check back every two hours." Not one of those spaces contained a vehicle. On the other side of the road, every space was occupied and people queued to pay at the machine. I know it used to be the rule that if the machinery was broken, parking was suspended; it struck me as being ridiculous, petty and jobsworth. "Please check back every two hours" is a reasonable compromise. Yet no one wanted free parking!
At lunchtime I realised I had just a few pence in my purse so I went to the NatWest opposite work. Twelve people queuing for the machine inside; twenty queueing for the machine outside. So I walked down to Victoria Street, and saw queues even longer inside and out. I walked a bit and spotted a Lloyds in the gardens by Scotland Yard. One woman was just finishing her transaction. Then it was my turn.
When I had just emerged from the office and was about to cross the road, a flotilla of police motorbikes with lights flashing arrived to halt traffic at the cross-roads. We stood around with an air of slight excitement and curiosity. A conversation started, and the consensus emerged that it was "Norway". Half a dozen or so vehicles passed in convoy, two of them Rolls Royce flying flags that were definitely not Norwegian. They might have been Soviet, but I doubt it, being that the Soviet Union was dissolved quite a few years ago. They might have come from the back entrance of the Tate.
But I haven't a clue who they were.
