18 Just Use the Thing

By the time Dai turned up in the JLB – as I'd heard increasingly loud mobile users refer to it throughout the afternoon – I was back on the coffee. It was 19.00hrs. I knew it was roughly four-and-a-half hours from Dai's place to anywhere south-east of London, if you avoided rush-hour. But commuter traffic wasn't to blame for the delay. Neither was the 20-mile-an-hour speed-limit in Wales, nor were any roadworks. No: Dai would have driven an idiosyncratic route. Just in case he was being followed.

'Come on, Mun. I'm parked on a double yellow, facing the wrong way on a one-way street.'

Dai's idea of staying off the grid perhaps wouldn't stand much of the scrutiny he really believed he was under. I knew he'd have used his sat-nav to get here. What I hadn't bargained for was running, or jogging as fast as two old geezers could anyway, a kilometer or so to the said one-way street.
The traffic warden hadn't yet issued the ticket. Lots of them like to wait until the culprit returns to the scene of the crime. The knack used to be for the underpaid public servant to get the biro on the pad just as the miscreant reached for their car keys. Then they could say, "I've started writing the ticket now, I must issue it, it's the law." It's all digital now. Except for the paper that spews out of the machine that replaced all the paper on the pad. I could see Dai was about to release a tirade on freedom of speech or parking or both. So I nudged him and said,

'Just use the thing, You know. The thing.'

Dai had experimented with making a Faraday bag for his car keys. It hadn't quite worked, well not in the way it was meant to. They stop people cloning your car keys. There had been two problems with Dai's bag. He didn't have electronic car keys for his ancient people carrier and it didn't work. At least not in the way it was supposed to, like I said. What it did do was stop anything remotely digital in a 10-metre radius from working. He still carried it about, in case it came in handy. Which was at that moment. Amazingly, I did not have to explain.  The Parking Enforcement Officer was battering at the keys on her whatchamacallit, to no avail.

I bribed her. We did a u-turn to the accompaniment of a horn concerto and headed out of Dodge.