So, it’s come to this. Teachers and parents at a school in Essex can now issue parking tickets to recalcitrant mothers and fathers who park cars too close to the school gates when dropping off their pampered offspring. I think this is a perfectly marvellous idea, if only because I love drama and the outcome of this is guaranteed to produce conflict and street theatre of peerless quality.
It’s not as if the school gates are anything other than a battle zone as it is. Underneath the cheery smiles of adults and embraces of beaming children, there are rifts and cracks larger than the ones that cyclists have to navigate as they manoeuvre their way past the 4x4s that some parents, giddy with their own sense of entitlement, have jammed up against the kerbside.
If there was a device that could capture emotion on camera and expose it in red, like an infra-red image – let’s call it “emotivision” – a school playground in the morning would glow like iron in a fire. Doubtless such equipment would also pick up a degree of genuine love and kindness, but I suspect the darker emotions would occupy an equal amount of the spectrum. There’s him from the PTA who voted against building a library on the football pitch because his own son is a semi-literate soccer nut. There’s her who heckled at the karaoke night; that fading lothario who leers at all the mothers at the after-school club.
If that wasn’t enough entertainment, parents and teachers issuing parking tickets takes things to a whole new level. Just imagine the pleasure a spurned mother might get from slapping a parking ticket on the windscreen of the stuck up yummy mummy who didn’t invite her to the fundraising makeup sale.
But why stop there? Once you have conceded the principle that teachers and parents can double as officers of the law, I could envisage a whole new range of measures that would help bring order and conformity to the free-for-all that marks the coming and going of pupils to school.
Powers of arrest could be conferred to deal with those who consistently brought their children to school late or hogged all the banana muffins from the cake stall. One could extend such powers to prohibiting hate speech – making catty remarks about slouchy teachers for instance, could put you in the Hole (formerly the stationery cupboard) for 24 hours.
There is a serious point to be made here. I do actually fume when I see people dropping their kids off at school on the zig-zag lines in Chelsea tractors, not only for environmental reasons, but also because it just shows such staggering arrogance, and accompanying sloth (some parents who do this only live a five-minute walk away). The sense of helplessness one feels in the face of such flagrant provocation really does feel it needs to be addressed in some way. But perhaps handing out statutory penalties is taking it a little far.
I think shaming is the best policy in such circumstances. Printing stickers that brand the culprits and that could be distributed to concerned parents would be the best solution. Such slogans as “I am Selfish and Lazy but I Have a Big Car So Fuck You” or “My Child is More Important Than Your Child” or “Internal Combustion Engines – Helping to Warm the Planet and Reduce Road Safety Since 1908”. To prevent overt conflict, these stickers would be placed surreptitiously on the rear of the vehicles when the driver wasn’t looking.
Yes, I grant you, such action would be sneaky and malicious, but one thing I have learned about the school gates is that fire is fought with fire. Naturally, this produces a conflagration in the end, but that’s beauty of the whole thing. What would the school run be without hate, fear and score settling? Besides, it sets a good example for the kids – who knew environmental politics could be such fun?
