For those that don’t know, a Blue Badge is a parking permit for disabled people, allowing them to park in specially marked parking bays or sometimes have exemption from parking fees. The recipient of these badges is supposed to be “significantly impaired by one or more of age, illness, disability or infirmity.”

Blooming cheek!

I take exception to these requirements as I don’t believe I fit into any of the above categories. I’m not an old dodderer, I don’t have an illness, I don’t think of myself as disabled in any way and I’d certainly describe myself as firm (you should see my six pack).

So what gives? Well I heard them talking between themselves about this (I can never decide whether they’re just extremely rude or imagine I’m completely deaf) and they reckon I’m ‘difficult’ to get in and out of the car. Difficult? Me? That’s ridiculous… I’m always keen to get in and out of the car as quickly as possible. In fact when I’m getting out I like to run as fast as possible in whichever direction looks the most appealing. Usually that’s to wherever I see some food. Sometimes this is through a car park or across a busy road, which is nothing like as dangerous as people imagine as in my experience most cars can stop surprisingly quickly.

Frowny tries to hold my hand while she’s getting ready but she’s not very strong so it rarely slows me down. If Smiley’s there it’s a different story – he’s a lot stronger than his flowery shirts suggest – but I find the old ‘passive resistance’ trick of making my body completely limp means I can often flop to the floor, escape from his grasp and take off on all fours. Hard on the knees though.

Of course I say I’m always keen to get in and out as quickly as possible, but now I come to think about it there are occasions when I really don’t want to get in or out of the car. This is usually on days where the entertainment has been a bit thin and I’ve found making my body as rigid as possible can be side-splittingly funny if I do it when they’re trying to get me through a narrow door opening, into a car seat and fasten a 3-point harness as well as a safety belt. If I can get my feet in the right place and grab onto the roof rails I can also make a good attempt at climbing up onto the roof of the car. It’s even better when a well-meaning but dim Samaritan passes by and offers to help, then I can grab spectacles, hats, hair, moustaches, necklaces, breasts… you name it.

To double the fun you can also make this routine work in the other direction: if we’ve arrived at somewhere that looks pretty dull, a 3-point ‘Houdini’ harness (I don’t know who this Houdini bloke was but he wasn’t up to much if he couldn’t escape from one of these) and a safety belt have so many straps between them that you can easily thread limbs through them and tie yourself in knots surprisingly quickly. If things are going really well I can sometimes roll into the footwell, making it all but impossible to separate me from the car. For maximum effect this is best carried out when they’re late for an appointment.

So there you are, I think we can dispense with all this talk of needing to park any closer to the shops than anyone else as I have no mobility problems whatsoever. Frowny and Smiley are plainly just milking the system.

Ah well, good luck to them I say – they need all the breaks they can get.

PS  One of the requirements for the Blue Badge is that the recipient has to display a head and shoulders, face-on photograph. Frowny fancies herself as a bit of a photographer and thought she’d have a go. I tried, I really tried to concentrate while she was taking these, but I’m afraid my mind kept wandering. Eventually she gave up and Smiley said he could put two or three of them together with something called Photoshop.