Little Red Car and Little Yellow Sticker

This morning I went to drop off a little card and retirement pressie to Alonso, the waiter who has served us in Mario 2 for 26 years.  As I was walking back home, I walked along Calle Londres (London Street), which was where we lived when we first arrived in Barcelona in 1991 and spent our first two happy years there.  Interestingly, our home now is just a 15 minute walk away.  This little butcher's shop is on Calle Londres, just along from our first rented flat. 

As I was walking across a little tree-lined square with benches, I remembered it used to be metered parking spaces and where we parked Francoise, our 2CV.  Bb was studying full-time for his MBA at IESE Business School  and I was teaching English at the Lewis School of Languages.  We were just one year married and loving our new life in Spain and having to watch our pennies was just part of the adventure.  

Bb used Francoise to go to school early in the morning and back every night.  Every morning he would take the parking ticket from behind the windscreen wiper and at night put it in the drawer in the flat.  We had quite a collection after 18 months.  Things were less computerised then and the car wasn't registered in Spain you see.  

One Friday night there were no spaces on the square and so he parked a few streets away.  It was a holiday weekend and we didn't use the car at the weekend.  On the Monday morning we went to get her back and instead of finding our little red car there was a little yellow sticker stuck on the road informing us that she'd been towed away.   Disaster!  We'd heard about those places deep underground, where the longer you left the car the more you had to pay to get it back.  And what if they made the connection with the parking tickets in the drawer?  I could see Francoise abandoned there for years and years.  Bb was wondering what we could sell.  I could see the headline in La Vanguardia: 'Scottish Lawyer jailed for 6 months'.  

We braced ourselves and went to the car pound, 4 floors underground, clutching the little yellow sticker in our sweaty hands.  We could see Francoise straight away, waving across at us - bright red, British number plate but in the classy French style (that's another story), and the first letter on the plate was B, which in those good old days was for Barcelona cars.  To confuse things even more, the driving wheel was on the 'wrong side' for Spanish cars.  The other quirky thing was the lack of a back seat, as we had driven from Edinburgh to Barcelona with all our worldly goods packed in the back. 

The little chappy at the desk took the little yellow sticker and blew smoke into our faces.  We tried not to cough.  Click clack clunk click clack clunk click clack clunk the machine went as he punched the number in.  We held our breaths.  He blew a few smoke rings up into the hot, stale air.  He was playing with the foreigners and probably thought we were French, making our crime much much worse.  Now he coughed, not a polite little clearing-your-throat cough, but the type of cough where one really should cover one's mouth with one's nicotine-stained fingers.  I looked at Bb and Bb looked at him. The little chappy didn't look at anyone but pointed at the amount on the clicky clacky clunky machine.  Bb breathed out and reached into his pocket for the pesetas, counted them out carefully and handed them over quickly.  I saw a week's shopping money disappear.  Bb saw the parking tickets, still safe in that drawer.  'Gracias', said Bb.  The chappie coughed again and forced out a 'Merci'.   He might have been speaking French, but then again it was probably Catalan.  

We tried not to skip away, but walked away sensibly, like grown ups who'd just paid a parking fine. We settled into Francoise's sunken seats, breathed in her familiar smells, and asked her please to start first time so that we wouldn't have to push. Yes!  Her engine turned over over nicely.  She wanted out too.  'Don't laugh yet', said Bb, the chappie is watching us.  We resisted the urge to wave, smile and laugh as we drove past his little smoky little cubby hole, but instead just chugged up the four floors in our little red car and emerged into the bright yellow sunshine to wave, smile and laugh and enjoy the rest of holiday Monday.