Clean Air Zone.

Gone are the good old days, then you could get a lift to an event, Town, the office, Work, School, the city! Kids were easily helped. The elderly. The disabled.

Tonight, Meghan is going to a concert I said, to her yesterday, “I will take you there and pick you up at the end.”

I remember a few days before the Manchester bombings, I had dropped Meghan off in Birmingham to see Ariana Grande. When I went to pick her up, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There were SO many cars and people, without a mobile phone, we would never have found each other. She had bought a T-shirt after the concert, it had all the tour dates on the back, Birmingham, Manchester became the last one of that tour. It did cross our minds, what IF it had happened at Birmingham.

At the end of another concert, Paul was with me, there were so many cars, all the roads, around the venue came to a standstill, the side roads the major roads, it was scary. No one could move! It seemed that 90% of us had come to pick up a fan from the concert. I felt sorry for the unsuspecting 10%. The police came, lots of them and after a very long time, they were able to get us moving, one car at a time.

Late last night, I had an afterthought, and this morning I said, to Meghan, “Before I can take you to the concert tonight, we have to check if my car is allowed inside the clean air zone.”

Meghan googled the venue and then asked me for my car registration number, of course I had to go back into my thousands of pictures, on my phone, to find a photo of it, even though I have had my car about five years!

When I eventually found it, she typed it into the online form, and it came up that I would need to pay a staggering £8 online first, to drive into the clean air zone! If I didn’t pay, I would get a fine in the post, a high one.

Gone are the good old days, when life was simpler.