PARKING FEES

Rather unusually, I had a little bit of a clearout of the car the other day, and this tiny pile of dashboard tickets represents some (but by no means all) of the cost of having to park at the hospital for the majority of the first six months of this year.

Visiting hours were between 2.00 and 4.00PM during the afternoons, and between 7.00PM and 8.00PM during the evenings (and NEVER during meal times!!!), although, during the couple of weeks that mum was in "the other place", visiting was between 6.00PM and 8.00PM, which actually worked better for us because it was twice as far from home as the usual venue. Also, when the patient is in a more critical condition, like mum was for a while, visiting hours are classed as "open" (depending upon which staff member greeted you) so that you could go any time and think whatever bleak thoughts were required of you.

Generally, at two quid a time for the minimum period of up to two hours, this represents a considerable investment of the many pound coins that you constantly find yourself scrabbling around to acquire and ensure that you have about your person, especially when occasionally a machine would take your money, refuse to give you a ticket, and refuse to respond to the coin return button either.

Sometimes, for those longer, trickier visits, it would be £5.00 for "all day"parking, assuming, of course, that you'd managed to find any parking at all at the time you arrived at the place, but at least it would never be a higher amount than that, not unless you had one of those unfortunate visits to make which passed the witching hour of midnight, and would see people, otherwise known as "the children of the night" sneaking outside at a crucial moment to feed the machine all over again as the rest of the country slipped into another day.

Occasionally I did use the supermarket across the road to park up outside of, so that, whilst one of us was shopping, the other would hop and skip their weary way the quarter mile or so over the road and into the hospital for an hour or so...

This was the kind of "money saving exercise" that I'm sure the supermarket tends to frown upon, but, given that it tended to cost us at least thirty quid in shopping, I think they kind of got their own back. And it's not as if we were just using them as a convenient nearby free parking lot... We were actually playing the part of paying customers for the duration, but we also happened to have other business in the area.