abandoned car

I parked the car yesterday on the little spur road which runs parallel with Southwood Lane. We’re currently in the somewhat unenviable position of not having a permit to park on the streets around our house. This is mostly because we’re about to move, but also because it took the DVLA a pathetic 3 months to send a log book through when we changed cars. Our last car literally fell apart at Pease Pottage Service Station in a scene reminiscent of The Wacky Races! One apparently can’t have a parking permit until ones log book is sent through. You can’t get road tax either. The more I go through life, the more I realise it’s fuelled by Catch 22s!

The good news is that, about ten minutes walk from us, there’s a street which doesn’t have parking regulations. And in London, these days, that’s like finding the Holy Grail. Sure, it’s in the middle of a wood, and most evenings one of the cars parked down there gets broken into, but free parking is free parking and our car isn’t exactly criminal bait!

Of course, you can only find a space down there at night time because, during the day, it’s full to the rafters with the vehicles of cheap-skate commuters who drive into London from their lovely houses in the country and pick up the tube at Highgate.

So many people who live in the countryside are so vehemently smug when it comes to issues surrounding the protection of the environment. “I have a vegetable patch and I grow ALL my own food in the summer.” Then they get in their enormous, gas-guzzling four-by-fours, drive into the city, making the air us city dwellers breathe more choked-up, buy their plastic bottles of water, throw the layers of plastic wrapping from their Pret lunch into London dustbins, and then drive back to their rural idylls, complaining that people in the cities are being outrageous by suggesting global warming is anything other than a problem generated by the cities themselves! The same people then get somewhat aerated when you suggest that we may need to build more houses in their villages and are very fast to talk about the need to fill brown field sites in cities first. Yay! Strain the infrastructure even more!

Anyway, that rather lengthy digression took me away from the point of my story, which is that, when I parked up on the spur road, I noticed that a car had been dumped, somewhat unceremoniously, in the middle of the road. It wasn’t parked. It looked a little bashed-up. The spur is a cul-de-sac, and the car was right at the top, so it wasn’t blocking anyone’s access apart from the people whose houses were at the very end of the road.

I went over to the abandoned car for a closer look. One of its tyres had blown out. The wheel arch had caved in. A few little labels had been attached to the back windscreen which said “police aware.”

As I was staring at the vehicle, I became aware of an old lady looking out of the window of a nearby house. She signalled for me to wait and then came to her front door and told me I was looking at a stolen car which had been dumped there the Friday before the Whitsun bank holiday, and that one of her neighbours had heard a loud bang, and had looked out of her window to see a group of lads in hoodies running away from the now abandoned car. She was in a real pickle. The car was entirely blocking access to her house.

The police had decided it wasn’t their responsibility and had passed the buck to the council, who, in turn, had told my new friend that there was nothing they could do because they couldn’t get a pickup truck down the narrow road.

Let’s put all this buck-passing nonsense into context. Firstly, broken windows syndrome dictates that any street which becomes a dumping ground for bashed-up cars, will, inevitably, go into decline. The message this abandoned car sends out is that this is a road which is not cared for. It’s a road where gangs of young people might decide to congregate to smoke dope. If the road is considered not to be monitored by police, then a gang member might decide to chuck a stone through the window of a local house or set fire to the abandoned car... and so it continues.

More to the point, the lovely lady with whom I was speaking was 92 years old. She’d recently got rid of her own car because she no longer felt safe driving it, but was utterly reliant on her driveway for carers, deliveries and taxis, so the abandoned car was actually stopping her from leaving her house. She’d been frantically calling people but felt no one was listening. As I left, she said, rather pathetically “what if I need an ambulance?”

Obviously I took to Twitter, because, tragically, negatively shaming people online seems to be the only way that anything gets done these days. I angrily tweeted Haringey council with a photograph. I angrily tweeted my MP with a different photograph. She responded and asked for more information.




And low and behold, this afternoon, I noticed that the car had been removed. Ah! The power of social media.