I heard two comments today. The first was from a woman in Hackney parking shop, a place where you go in a usually vain attempt to get out of paying parking fines or to pay for the privilege of parking on your street. In short, a place where tempers are short. She was irate about something or other, and began a rant which ended, “Hackney Council, it’s all take, take, take. They’ll be charging us to go to the toilet next.”
Then, on a local news programme, an interesting scheme to cool down the Tube, where temperatures even in an English summer can reach over 40 degrees (whereas the maximum temperature to transport animals is 25 or so). The presenter, introducing the cool and cooling scheme of a London professor, said, “it uses a free resource,” before showing a river that is now running under a bit of Victoria station, and doing a grand job of cooling it.
Both these comments had in common the fact that they assumed that things should be free whereas I think they should be paid for. Or at least, it’s not the end of the world, in a rich economy like ours, to be charged for the expensive – and energy intensive/wasteful – commodity that is water. Water is only free if you catch it as rain. Everything else has to be stored and treated. It costs money. As for toilets, it would be nice if they were all free, but I’d rather pay 20 pence to use one, thus boosting the council’s budget, than be confronted with yet another closed public toilet.
Rant over.