Parking has been a pain in the ear in and around Selkirk more or less since the advent of popular motoring.
I took a slow walk along the High Street to the Market Place last Saturday morning. While there was a fair amount of incautious and, at times, plain selfish parking going on, traffic continued to flow without too much hindrance. On weekdays I realise it is much worse and I must set aside my creed of live and let live to admit we need to bring a little discipline to the situation.
I cannot find any good reason to employ parking regulation enforcers in the style of the famed Edinburgh Blue Meanies, but maybe we need something a little more human and effective.
We should look no further for guidance than the times when Selkirk had its very own traffic warden. George Young operated largely according to his own values – common sense, a rather nautical vocabulary and a larger-than-life personality.
Somehow I fear we'll never find another George, so we should perhaps pass on to strategies more in keeping with the times in which we live.
For starters, this is not a task we can readily pass to the police who are now more noted by their absence from the town than any visible presence. That does not imply any criticism of the police service, rather than it having to adapt to changing needs in a society which is more violent, criminal and demanding than ever.
As I have said, employing civilian enforcers is a bad compromise on the missing-copper syndrome. These guys are not the cream of the crop and operate on narrowly-fixed principles, chief of which must surely be that if you pay peanuts, you hire monkeys. Additionally, it does not take a genius to work out when parking attendants are working and when they are not.
And that brings me to the nub of the matter. Illicit parking is governed by nothing more complicated than the prospect of being caught and fined an eye-watering sum of money, or the real prospect of having one's precious motor car removed to a pound from which recovery costs are the stuff of second mortgages.
So, brace yourself, here is the Pilgrim solution for this week.
We have already got a reasonably-comprehensive closed circuit camera system in the town centre. A few more cameras, linked to a centre with 24-hour manning, number plate recognition and recording would allow an operator to catch offenders in the act, process the offence and send out a fixed penalty to the owner of the offending vehicle, rather in the same method used in speed detection cameras.
Following the speed camera analogy tells us it how well it works, as the fall in ghastly accidents on roads protected by speed cameras is a well-documented fact. If further proof was required, just cock an ear to the bleating and whining from those who find the cameras a hindrance to their feckless, illicit and dangerous driving style.
With camera-based parking enforcement, the prospect of detection would be ever present, there would be no humans on the scene to abuse or attack, and if that means we are a little more in the clutches of the 'Big Brother is watching you' scenario, then so be it.
Alternatively, we could work a little harder for a bypass.

Read of the Week

Should you be unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of attention from traffic wardens, I suggest you find a copy of In The Office of Constable, by Robert Mark, one of the most competent coppers of all time.
In the run-up to his eventual appointment as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Robert Mark was Chief Constable of Leicester, a town hopelessly congested by a complete lack of parking enforcement. So in 1961, Robert Mark was the man who gave Britain its first traffic wardens – a gallant band, largely female, who rapidly transformed the situation.
I have no shame in quoting the terms of reference given to those pioneers of good parking: "Your efficiency will not be judged by the number of tickets you issue, but the freedom of your patrol area from vehicles parked in contravention of the law!"
And if that does not sum up the parking problem in the Royal Burgh, then nothing will.