DVLA Camera Vans and Toilet Seats

Well today I got three hours sleep but then I was ill in bed all day yesterday until I had to get up at about 6 from boredom and the need to cook something for my daughter.  Strangely I do not feel too bad.  I slept from 6 in the morning to 9 am.  I have taken a pain killer just in case I get a headache because I needed to take my father to Tesco to do his shopping and I will need to go pick him up when he's done.  Prior to taking him I thought I could be efficient because I had just received my DVLA renewal notification for road tax so I went to the web site to renew it and came across the annual problem that the insurance is due to run out on 26th January and the road tax renewal is due for 1st February.  Their 'oh so effing clever' system is clever enough to prosecute me if I do anything wrong but it is not clever enough to allow ME to be responsible for my legal affairs and to BUY road tax and be responsible for BUYing compulsory insurance.  They actually won't renew the road tax until their interfering system can authenticate a valid insurance for the day the road tax is due to start.  It doesn't take a software engineer to see the contradictory stupidity of it all.

I have to wait until the 27 January when the rollover insurance becomes valid for one year from 27 January 2013 to 26 January 2014 and then I can renew my MANDATORY road tax and wait for it to arrive through the post.  When it arrives on 2 February I have then been breaking the law for one day because it is MANDATORY to DISPLAY the tax disk in the vehicle.

But then things got worse.

Image courtesy of Martin Veale
Steel and Survival: Motoring Notes 

I couldn't renew my road tax because the 'authorities' want control whilst they still want to hold me responsible when things go wrong.  Whilst at Tesco I saw a white van driving around the car park.  It had what appeared to be four cameras on the roof pointing down at about 45 degrees.  It had DVLA writ large on the side.  I was shocked;  Shocked in that intellectual way rather than emotionally.  Emotionally I am in despair at the state of our civilisation.  Did I just call it 'civilisation'?  Oh the trickery of the language.  But here was this van driving slowly round and round so I stood out in the roadway and politely flagged the van down.  The young tattooed guy driving the van politely stopped and wound his window down.  I asked him if he was doing what it looked as if he was doing and he confirmed he was taking photos of people's licence plates to check if they had valid road tax and asked why.  I said it was so dreadful that it comes to this and he said "Well if people would pay their tax it wouldn't have to."  I said that I was not criticising him personally but I was just sad that the authorities could spend so much attention to making sure everybody has paid their road tax but they don't allocate it correctly and won't put so much effort into making sure everybody has got what they need, like jobs.

"Oh well," I mused, "it just gets more fascist all the time."  He kind of agreed with me.  That, I guess, is a plus.  I don't for one minute blame him for doing an available job - if I were offered that opportunity today I would take it - and it was a pleasant surprise that he didn't feel the need to overly 'justify' his role.

One of the problems that I keep encountering is how people will explain "A" reason why something is justified as if it is the whole story.  Of course if you have an arrangement such that collectively we pay for the roads through road tax then there is a fair obligation on road users to pay that tax.  But the authorities are not using that money to pay for the roads and the road tax has just jumped from £180 last year to £220 this year which makes no sense at all.  It is just theft.  But the politicians and the police and the judiciary are not held to the same rigid correctness that they are happy to apply to the plebs.  And, I gather from Martin Veale's blog that, they are happy to clamp your vehicle if it does not show up on their system that it has a valid road tax licence.  But that is not only condemning someone without a trial but it is happily doing what the machinery dictates.

Then I went home and phoned the insurance people hoping they could authenticate the insurance renewal so that I could get my tax disk on time.  The lady who answered the phone was blonde.  Now I am not prejudicial and I was blond once (but I'm better now) but some people dye their hair blond and the motive that drives most girls to dye their hair blond is 'appearance';  They want to be sexually attractive to the opposite sex.  They like alpha males and want a man to look after them and protect them.  They are needy for approval.  As an aside here I will say that you can tell a lot about people from a conversation on the phone.  I once arranged a meeting with a businessman in London and I almost knew he would be wearing a yellow waistcoat.  When I arrived at the meeting he was wearing a yellow waistcoat.  The girl on the insurance helpline was not only blond but was wearing high heeled shoes and she had red nail varnish on her fingers and transparent gloss nail varnish on her toes.  But that aside she was 'politely' brisk and it was a little difficult talking to her.  I explained that her brain was clearly function much faster than mine this morning.  She believed me.  When I explained the difficulty and the legal conundrum she said that I shouldn't worry if the tax disk is a few days late.  She actually said "I can assure you, hand on heart, because my husband is a traffic policeman, that they wouldn't prosecute you for that."  Well I was momentarily speechless.  I said that there might be lots of nice policemen (I lied) but the automated system would not apply that kind of understanding.  I thanked her for her help and wished her a nice day.

It is not surprising that our society is collapsing when such nice people can believe it is such a nice world because they do what the oppressive control freaks want, look pretty, and get shagged regularly.  They must think it is like that for all of us - unless we are old gits that live in an attic and get what we deserve.

So far the day was going well!

Then my mother broke the toilet seat again.  I am too tired to make an interesting story out of that but it was vaguely interesting and I benefitted financially from sorting the problem out so I can't complain.