Parking in Bristol city centre the other night I was surprised to find that the parking meters, which grab quite a large sum of money, not only requested the amount of time you wanted to park but also required your car registration number. I've not come across this before and it was annoying because I had to traipse back to the car to check mine and yell out the numbers. I can't quite work out why this is needed. Is it some kind of security requirement, so that someone somewhere can check on where you were on a particular night? Or perhaps a little helpmate for parking meter attendants with short term memory problems. Or is it to stop people handing over their partially unused minutes on the tickets? Perhaps someone could tell me if I'm being thick. Whatever the motive, it certainly means that you can't hand over your ticket if there are any remaining minutes on it. How mean is that? Almost all parking tickets, including Caradon's, have 'not transferable' printed on them. Caradon's actually say 'not transferable unless indicated' which, as I have never seen anywhere indicated that suggests they encourage the handing over of tickets, doesn't actually mean anything. But why on earth shouldn't one person who has put in a certain amount of money and not used it up give the ticket to another person? Nobody is going to lose. It doesn't happen anywhere else. If I buy four bananas and find I can only eat two, so I give one to somebody else, the greengrocer I bought them from is hardly likely to gallop out of his or her shop and scream, 'stop that illegal banana eating,' and tell me that I can't give them to someone else to eat because they are 'not transferable', are they? Sorry, but I'm not going to listen. Last year I was sitting in my car with the engine ticking over in a car park at Rock. This is a posh riverside resort opposite Padstow which is reputed to be where young members of the royal family and other luminaries hang out, so it is fairly popular, and parking spaces in the council car park are like gold dust. Just as I was about to give up a group of boy surfers, all baggy clothes, bronze tans, blonde hair, the, 'if only I was 45 years younger,' type, walked by. One of them stopped, tapped on my window and said, 'we're going now, just pull up closer to stop anyone else getting our space'. They all climbed into a gaily painted van and then the same boy got out, ran over and handed me a ticket saying, 'we've only been here an hour and we paid for eight'. It quite made my day. What it brought to mind was that I used to know a certain person, no names mentioned here, who would suggest we sat in the car until we had used up all the car parking time just so the council, or whoever owned the space, didn't get away with any of our precious paid for time! This was the same person who used to insist the children drank all the milk in the jug if we went out to tea, even if they didn't want to! So, I'm going to defy the car park police and hail as heroes all those kind souls who stick their tickets to the machine with unused portions on them. I should add that while out with friends at a coastal village hereabouts I found the same kind of parking meter as the ones in Bristol. 'I've a good mind to give a false car number,' I said crossly. My friends looked at me as if I was stupid. I looked at me as if I was stupid, and nobody mentioned it afterwards. Two things in the news at the moment. One, yet more crisis in education with the not particularly surprising revelation that even more children leave primary school without being able to read and write than ever before. And I suspect that quite a few leave senior education without being able to either. I don't blame teachers, they have to stick to whichever daft curriculum they are handed that month; ever changing and not for the better. When is someone going to admit that the best way to equip a child with the skills to last a lifetime is, for the first few years, to entirely concentrate on the now apparently dumped three Rs? Nevermind if it isn't as much fun as making papier mache models of sailing ships or learning to play the triangle, triangle playing is unlikely to get a job in later life, unless someone aspires to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra triangle section. Teach a child to read and write at an early age and the world is their oyster, or, if they can't, their lobster. Secondly, the Government is encouraging people to eat leftovers. Oh, that's a new one. Having spent a childhood terrified by the contents of the larder which usually promised some extremely interesting but not necessarily edible concoctions for the next meal, I can't see that going down too well. And anybody who had experienced my grandmother's pea and ham soup, three leftover peas, a slice of ham, yesterday's potatoes and a lot of new water, would know what I mean. Not that I disagree, we all waste a lot of food. But we have also been indoctrinated by the Government and other agencies' warnings on food poisoning, sell by dates and the terrible consequences of failing to remove every single last scrap of bacteria from our homes, friendly or not. Few children and many adults will eat anything which has appeared before, no matter how nutritious. Take bubble and squeak, actually, we should, said the report. A good mixture of vegetables to be prepared into a delicious next day feast. I've done bubble and squeak in this column before, so you know I approve. Sadly, one of the broadsheets, and it could only be a broadsheet, printed a recipe which not only advised cooking extra fresh vegetables, which rather missed the point, but suggested that the end result should be fried in OLIVE OIL. Now I'm a huge fan of olive oil, I can bore people with olive oil talk with the best of them, but olive oil does not belong with bubble and squeek. Good beef dripping yes. Fat from the previous day's joint, yes. Lard and butter mix, yes. Fancy foreign oil, no. Frying, of course, is a dirty word now. Get thee behind me Satan's frying pan. So perhaps poor old bubble will be off the menu unless someone invents a recipe for grilling it. Perhaps we should change the word leftovers to something else. Recycled food maybe, with 'green' thrown in somewhere, along with 'save the planet'. Green save the planet rissoles made from set aside recycled non-meat products should do the trick. Meanwhile my generation, brought up to disguise yesterday's food, will carry on as usual. Actually, I wish governments would just govern, rather than trying to teach their grandmothers to suck eggs. Or in my grandmother's case, how to turn two ounces of lamb, four roast potatoes, eight sprouts and a suspicious heap of carrots, which I swore I left on my plate yesterday, into a 'country casserole'.
