Sharon Feinstein

I’m the sort of person who pays her bills before they arrive. I’m not happy unless I feel that all that admin and beauracracy in ones life is out the way and in the drawer. So imagine my horror as I stood beside my car at the car wash over the weekend, and sauntered up to the windscreen, gazing aimlessly at the tax disc, when I noticed the number 4,  which generally stands for April .  I thought I was seeing things through the soap suds but it was still there when the car was newly shiny and polished. My tax disc had run out in April.
I rushed home and went online to pay, calm down, and sink back into that sleepy security of no outstanding bills. But it only got worse! You can’t pay your tax disc, I was told, because you have no MOT.
What !! This must be some sort of macabre joke. I reached into my ever-so-ordered file saying Car, and hauled out the relevant MOT, which, oh my God, had run out at the beginning of November 2008. This was too much for me as I realised I’d been blithely driving about for 7 months with no MOT, therefore no legal insurance, and then no tax disc. I thought big cranes came out of the sky and took cars away to Never Never land in those cases, with motorists banned for life. And white vans with electronic Big Brother beams zoomed  in at night, their  X Ray eyes detecting all non tax payers.
How had I escaped ? And how had I not even been shopped by the eagle-eyed, all-seeing and all-nosey vicar and vicaress next door. This is a total mystery, apart from one lame explanation that if you don’t even know you’re a criminal you carry on so calmly and confidently no one else knows either.
Needless to say I’ve paid all that now and am a law abiding motorist once again. But who knows what else is lurking behind my glossy exterior of neat files and up to date bills. I certainly don’t.