"Free" Parking

Twice in the last week I have been subjected to the efforts of avoiding paying for parking. And rightly so, to a certain degree. It seems that to park your vehicle within a 5 mile radius of Bath’s city centre you must be prepared to part with half your life’s savings, desperately scrabbling around on the floor of your car, in any crack or crevice, door pocket or glove box, for the last of your change. And when you realize that money isn’t reproducing in the dark under the passenger seat, you are faced with an even tougher challenge than finding money in the first place; finding free parking. I know of three locations now in Bath where I can park for two hours, no return within one hour. Unfortunately, I have turned into such a stingy old bat that I simply refuse(/cannot physically afford) to pay for parking anymore, to the extent that I seem to spend my life driving between these three free locations waiting for someone to leave and for the perfect opportunity to snap up a well-deserved parking spot. Which of course, always happens in the end. I wasn’t expecting it to take me thirty-four minutes though. By the time I had queued in the rush hour traffic a good seven times nipping to and fro between my potential parking spots, I realized the money I would be saving from parking, I was spending in petrol, thus making my expedition terribly futile. And just as I was giving in, ready to return home, I swooped magnificently round the corner and everyone else who had been super-scrimping and parking for free, had decided to leave and then suddenly I was faced with not only one parking spot, but a whole selection to choose from. I have yet to decide whether I think such an excursion was worth so much of my time, effort and unfortunately money, but were I reading this dilemma in Aunt Sally’s advice column, surely the reply would be either to keep an eternal supply of change in the glove box, or perhaps to just walk.