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There are many things that irritate me beyond measure, as you know. A short, stout fellow with a uniform brought another of them to mind last week as he slapped a parking ticket on the windscreen of my car.

Unknown to anybody, Cornwall Council had taken it upon itself to change the designation of a roadside parking area where folk like me have parked for free for an hour for 20 years or more. It is now only for residents, and if you don’t display a resident’s permit, that’ll be £35, thanks very much.

Naturally, the council has taken no trouble to make sure people are warned – notices, posters, leaflets, a warning-first policy, for example – because this would not make any money. And Cornwall Council does not make nearly enough money out of us, does it?

I think parking is an absolute scandal. If you examine it on any level it is a perfect symbol for the way we have allowed our lives to be ordered with no thought for logic or service or community or efficiency or even decency.

We have allowed councils to charge fortunes to park in town centres on publicly owned land – that is, our land – and thus contribute to the exodus to the free car parks on the fringes of all our towns, where Beelzebub’s superstores have spawned.

We have allowed councils to tell us we must pay because it costs them money to install ticket machines and employ traffic wardens, without pointing out that providing free parking on our land would cost them nothing at all.

Rather than demand we be allowed to park for free to enable shopkeepers to pay their business rates and taxes, we have permitted ourselves to pay parking ticket fees which are but pence compared to the said rates and taxes businesses would contribute if town centres hadn’t been killed off.

When the parking fascists get their claws into us, we rush to pay because we are offered a kindly discount if we settle up quickly – never mind the rights or wrongs, pay £35 now or £75 later. Hurry!

An alternative? Well, the cities have their public transport, of course. Here in Cornwall? Nothing.

Before the rise of the leviathan that is Cornwall Council, one former district council adopted a 10p per first hour parking fee to encourage shoppers into its towns. It began to work. But then it was scrapped by Cornwall Council.

Once, our society looked on the provision of parking as an enabling service: providing parking enabled people to go places, buy things, do things, see things. Now the provision of parking has, like everything else, been hived off to those principled, concerned do-gooders of the private sector, giving us something that is more a tax than a service. Certainly, parking your car to go on holiday can cost more than the bloody holiday.

Perhaps the apex of this national scandal is the way the NHS – free at the point of need, our great icon of social justice – enables monsters like NCP to run its car parks, ripping money off people at their point of lowest resistance, charging people to bring love and aid to the sick and old and dying. Want to help somebody? Want to hold your loved one’s hand and say you love him one more time? That’ll be £4.20, and if you give one goodbye kiss too many we’ll clamp you.

Disgusting. Really, really disgusting.

(When my mother died in Derriford Hospital, I was given a leaflet about bereavement and told that, as a recently bereaved person, if I displayed it in my car I would not need to pay for parking. I used that leaflet for months).

Anyway, don’t any of you start having a go at me for being naïve and wanting something for nothing: I’m not expecting anything for nothing – but I’ve already paid for the parking, through my taxes and national insurance and council tax.

If councils spend too much money on pen-pushing suit-wearing meeting-attending officers who abuse the English language with weasel words like “appropriate”, that’s not my fault. And I shouldn’t be made to subsidise their training courses, consultants’ fees and expense allowances with my parking tickets.

What’s that? Parking money goes back to the NHS and helps us out? Fool. It goes to the shareholders of the private companies who’ve been gifted a licence to print money, like every other privatisation in existence.

Told you it irritates me. Parking. Another of the insidious little ways in which our lives and environments and communities have been cheapened, and we’ve cheerfully subsidised the whole damned thing.

Talking of…

Talking of privatisation, I see the Royal Mail is the next monopoly to be handed over free to rich people in order to make them richer, at our expense. Is nobody protesting? Is nobody pointing out that there is not one single, solitary example of a privatisation that has resulted in a better, more efficient, more popular provision for the public? Has nobody pointed out the difference between things you choose and things you need?

Talking of irritating, this is one of the more irritating paragraphs I’ll ever face. But I have to say how much I admired David Cameron for his principled stance on the gay marriage bill, his consistency on the provision of equality and his strength in standing up to the Bufton Tuftons on the right. I hope he will display as much strength to the baying cretins who say he should not take a holiday with his family. Cameron cancelling a holiday will not provide a solution to the terrible divisions that led to last week’s appalling tragedy in Woolwich.

Animals magic

Generally, I am very much happier with anything that keeps me away from a world that manages to be cheap and expensive at the same time.

Yesterday, in the sunshine, I applied myself once more to Brother Yardie’s former Leylandii. We chopped down two tons of it at his place the other week then threw it in a corner of my field so I could use it for firewood, and for weed suppressant.

This has necessitated a long, laborious process of lopping and sawing, clipping and stacking, because the Brother Who Must Not Be Named has forbidden me from using a chainsaw. The BWMNBN considers me a total and utter Michael Gove in anything that requires a level of manual skill. “Not even an electric chainsaw?” I pleaded. “I’ve got one of those, and I’m not letting you use that either,” he declared. “You are not to use a chainsaw of any type because you will chop something off yourself. In fact, I’m not altogether sure you should be going near a handsaw.” This is all a foul slander, of course, but there is no reasoning with the Brother Who Must Not Be Named.

Anyway, back on the bright side and there I am, labouring at the Leylandii face, loppers and wheelbarrow and saw and everything, in a sunny corner of the field. The horses are curious so they are stood behind me, Linton nudging my back every now and then in the hope of an apple core. Beside them sits the mad collie, the heat preventing her, for a moment, from behaving despicably. Beside her sits Captain Pusstasticus in eye-on-the-main-chance pose. I am working like a whipped cur, and they, clearly, have the life of Riley.

At least I can share it with them. Walking the mad mutt in the woods last week, I saw an otter, working its way down a brook to the river. I sat and watched for a few minutes as it leapt in and out of the water, up and down the bank, sinuous and lithe. It made my week.

And finally

Many thanks to all of you who retweeted my link to last week’s column – any chance of the same again, please?