Wednesday 18 September 2019

Blue Badge Blues

Every so often I get a reminder from Facebook that I haven’t written anything in Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard for a while. It’s probably intended to be polite and helpful but, it being Zuckerberg it feels high-handed and dictatorial. Especially when added to the pressure I put on myself to keep this updated. Occasionally the pressure tells and I start mashing my keyboard. Tonight is one such occasion.

I want to talk to you about blue badges. Readers of my last entry will remember that I went to Rhodes in June. We parked the car at one of Manchester Airport’s many long stay car parks and happily forgot about it for a week. What I had also forgotten, and failed to remember until several days after my return when one of Liverpool City Council’s traffic wardens plonked a £25 penalty charge notice on my windscreen, was that my blue badge had expired. It had in fact expired on June 30, four days before I returned to England and it is blind, dumb luck that none of Manchester City Council’s traffic wardens seemed to notice.

In many ways I wish they had as it would have prompted me to renew it online there and then so I would have it by now. I am now into gruelling Week 11 of the wait for my application to be processed. Who would have thought that it would take longer than a Cricket World Cup? The blurb on the website says it can take between six to 12 weeks which I can only attribute to the suspicion that every chancer waking up with a headache is submitting an application. Most of these might get knocked back. How else can one explain the sheer volume of motorists parking in blue badge spaces outside their local Tesco without blue badges? Perhaps the government should solve this problem by just handing them out to everyone who passes a driving test.

The fact that so many drivers use blue badge spaces illegally and without any consequences makes my fines (I’ve had another one since, I never learn) all the more galling. My fines have come from parking at work. There is currently a ludicrous amount of work going on in the area as those city centre flyovers made almost famous by Sky One’s Sean Bean car-race fiasco ‘Curfew’ are being demolished. All of which leaves almost no adequate parking, and less than none if you are a wheelchair user whose blue badge has expired. I was chancing it in my employer’s own blue badge spaces but they have since become a victim of the ongoing work. You can park free with a blue badge in the street parking outside the entrance to the building but if you forgot to renew the bloody thing then parking there costs £5.20 for four hours.

I’m one of those shocking bastard disabled people who insist on working full time, so when you do the sums I am currently spending £10.40 per day on parking at work. Economy hasn’t been this false since Manchester United paid Alexis Sanchez £300,000 a week. I have twice spoken to St Helens Council about my blue badge application and after an embarrassing attempt to fudge the situation by claiming they hadn’t received my email containing the information they requested I managed to get them to reveal that my badge would be with me within five to 10 working days. That was last Tuesday, September 10. St Helens is behind the times in many ways. It must have the smallest number of actual shops per square mile of any town bar fucking Westeros but I hadn’t realised they’d converted to a two-day working week.

About that information they requested anyway. I was born with Spina Bifida (despite autocorrect’s attempts to make that Sonia Bifida) 44 years ago. Spina Bifida is like that sly, smug look on Laura Kuenssberg’s face. It’s permanent. Yet every three years I am required to submit documentary evidence that I am in receipt of whatever shambolically conceived disability benefit is in vogue at the time. At the moment it’s PIP (Personal Independence Payment) but who knows what it will be next time around. Whatever it is called even this sociopath-led Tory fuckwit government will be hard pushed to doubt my credentials for it. There is no cure on the way and even if there was why should I bother? My biggest disability is the inability of government and society to make life physically and socially accessible. It’s easier and no doubt cheaper to build trains with level access and put lifts in all buildings than it is to develop and build ludicrous exo-skeletons to haul riff-raff like me to my feet. Stop trying to fucking fix me and get your own house in order. In the meantime can we not just write down the names of all the permanently disabled blue badge applicants on....oh I don’t know a census or wherever the data from that 20-page PIP application form they send out every year is stored so that those of us with conditions which are about as likely to change as the plot of a Rambo movie won’t have to go through this charade!

So there we are. Eight hundred words on how my carelessness means my employment is currently not cost effective topped off nicely with another epic rail against society and, most deservedly of all, those demonic fucking Tories. If that isn’t Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard, Mr Zuckerberg, what is?

1 comment:

Sue said...

Anthony and I have been caught out by "change of system" with our blue badges. Once we turned up at the council office as usual to get it renewed to be told it had now been centralised and would take up to 12 weeks. I was unhappy, like you and expressed the fact. The person I spoke to said "didn't you hear the advert on the radio in January about the change?" Hmmm "yes that's why I'm here!" That's what I wanted to say. Instead I said "No obviously not, did you hear the advert about wheelchair basketball in January?" to which she replied "no" and I responded "strange that isn't it, I mean we all listen to the radio for important information". I explained the predicament it left Anthony and I in as trying to find parking for one wheelchair user is hard but 2 is well harder. Apparently there was nothing she could do to speed things up and her advice was "just don't park in blue badge spaces or double yellow lines". Cheers!!
Now the second time was about 15 months ago when we were informed that we could apply for our renewal 2 weeks before they ran out so we applied and then told the badge will take up to 28 days. Do the maths....