Don't be silly on parking

For us, one is the “grumpies’ gripes” or letters section of the local paper. No matter where you are, they always complain about roughly the same thing – over and over again. We try to ignore it and get on with the good things of life.

One of them is undoubtedly the shopping and parking in Bexhill, but your correspondent Terence Moss (Observer, December 3) proposes to damage that by restricting town centre parking to an hour and to police it rigorously.

We’ve just come from such a town, and it’s a pain in the proverbial ... that’s why we never shopped in the town centre there. You get into town, park, visit the bank and/or the post office and/or the library and then spend a maximum of nine minutes each in of four or five shops.

You then hit the 50-minute mark, and run like mad back to the car to shift it before the “blue meanies” hit you with a £30 shopping surcharge. No thanks.

Here we can drive into town, certain that we will find an on-street parking space within five minutes, do all our shopping around half a dozen pleasant and uncrowded shops, have coffee or lunch, and go home, happy and completely unstressed. Job done.

If you put in an unnecessary one-hour limit, then these two customers will immediately desert the town centre and head out to Ravenside shopping centre.

We won’t like it one little bit, but we’ll do it, rather than put up with the rush and stress of dashing round town in a panic. I suspect a lot of others will do the same. Tesco will love it.

Here’s a list of shops and cafes that will lose our weekly custom for good: newsagent, butcher, baker, greengrocer, pet shop, sweet shop, pound shop, all the charity shops, fishmonger and several cafes.

Don’t be silly.

JOE FAIRCLOUGH

Whydown Road

Bexhill-on-Sea