I went to the post office to pay my road tax, expecting one of those nice paper discs to stick on my windscreen, but I didn’t get one. They are no more. What a worry. How will anyone know I’ve paid?
“Here’s your receipt,” said the post-office lady. “Don’t lose it.” That sounds a bit risky. Nor do I have a paper resident’s parking permit, paid for online. Do I even have a proper, material receipt for that? Don’t know. And now the parking machines round here don’t issue tickets. The screen tells you how long you can park for. What if I forget what it said? How can I trust it?
Where is the information about my tax, parking and tickets? How does anybody know what I’ve done? I have no proof, or reminders. I used to be able to look at my windscreen and see when this or that ran out, and when I ought pay it, but what is there to remind me now? A blank.
Will I get a message from somewhere? How will it arrive? In what form? What if it doesn’t? What if the council IT system breaks down and no one knows who’s paid what to whom? I could be fined £thousands, or incarcerated. Am I catastrophising? That was the doctor’s diagnosis, when I had tingling fingers and thought it the beginning of a fatal degenerative disease. No. This time I’m being reasonable. Because those ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition cameras) that wardens point at your car misread 1.2m licence plates a day. Nor can they tell which are fake plates stuck on by crooks.
Be very afraid. I am. I live in a state of fairly constant fear anyway, and this general move away from paper into the ether isn’t helping me. Rosemary has just been asked by email by the garden fencers whether they can take her payment from card ending ****? How dare they poke into her finances, which are also floating about in the nothingness? Who is taking our non-money from where? We don’t like it. But does anyone care what we don’t like?
