A Tale of Three Cones

Welcome to New Street, Barlestone. The house on the left is where I live with my wife Sue and adult son David. The houses here date from the first decade of the 20th century and the street today probably looks just about the same as it did 100 years ago with its rough surface and puddles, but the cars are a more recent innovation!

That is because the street was never adopted by the local council, is not maintained and does not benefit from streetlights. On the plus side, every resident owns the piece of street outside their home and has every right to tell someone not to park there – a right that is essential given that hardly anyone has off-street parking.

Hence the cones. My wife goes to work in town and uses our car to get there. When she gets home in the evening she needs to be sure that she can park in front of our house, as the alternative is to inconvenience a neighbour by taking their parking space or parking on the much busier road to which New Street leads. The way to ensure that the space is available is to place a traffic cone in the space in the hope that other people will respect it and not obstruct it.

We used to have a small cone that did this job – it’s the one on the right in the picture above. The problem was that some visiting drivers simply didn’t see it. They would park in the space next to the coned one then drive straight over it when they moved away or manoeuvred to turn round in the street. Usually the cone survived being mangled in this way, but eventually it had one encounter too many with a car wheel and the base broke into two pieces, as the photo shows.

So we ordered a new cone – bigger, flashier, more visible! It’s the one on the left in the photo. It stands every chance of doing the job we need it to do and not being ignored by some dozy delivery driver.

When it arrived – courtesy of a less-than-dozy delivery driver – my son unwrapped it so that it could be put to immediate use. As he did so he made an unexpected discovery, namely that inside the cone was another one! This extra cone had its own delivery label, which was for an address in Epsom, Surrey, which is a considerable distance from Barlestone, Leicestershire!

So we therefore now have three cones – or at least we did before I threw the broken one in the  bin. I don’t think that we’ll be sending the spare one on to Surrey, but we have informed the supplier about their mistake and they can collect it should they so wish. If they don’t bother to collect it, we’ll have two cones for the price of one!