Victory!

I am jumping for joy. At least in my mind! I am £250 the richer for winning my appeal for having my car towed away. I am really quite a law abiding citizen and that includes how I use my car: I don't park on yellow lines, I don't jump the lights and I don't (very often) break the speed limit.

So, having parked against a wall, between two driveways on a residential road on a December afternoon, with snow still on the ground, I naturally dialled 999 when I returned to find my car was missing because I thought it had been stolen. Ha ha ha! I had forgotten I lived in Haringey, where any excuse is good enough to relieve you of a tidy sum.

Anyway, having retrieved my car from the car pound, I appealed to Haringey and I lost. I had nothing to lose, so I appealed to the independent adjudicator and, this time, I won. He agreed that there had been no offence.

It is a small matter but it boosted my morale hugely to have someone act intelligently and sanely. The moral is: nothing ventured nothing won. But I have a question: What moral right have Haringey to levy a fine of £250, which is an inordinate amount of money for what they - wrongly - assessed as a parking offence? I thought highway robbery went out a couple of hundred years ago!