My day in court

04:02:2008
well, the back rooms of a court.
OK, so I did 37mph in a 30mph zone. It was late at night and I was clocked by a speed camera. Strangely enough when the bill came it wasn't from the local council but from the HMCS (Her Majesty's court service). They offered me 3 points and £60 fine or no points and an afternoon at Traffic School, which would have cost £95. I opted for the points as my licence is clean and I'm skint.
So I have to send my licence (the old style paper-only kind) to get the points added, and I pay by a credit card which, a couple of days later, gets used for some dodgy premium rate phone calls, so I get the card cancelled and replaced. Now I'm worried I won't get the licence back in time before I'm due to go abroad and will need the licence to hire a car.
So I call the HMCS and they tell me the payment didn't go through because the card was cancelled. Shit. Then I am told that if I go to a certain address in Westminster between 9am and 4pm I will be able to pay by cash or cheque. It's a hassle but I have to get that licence back.
So I arrive at this faceless concrete building round the back of some Magistrate's courts and then it gets weird. First they won't let me in, and interrogate me via the video-intercom about who told me I could turn up in person and what was my reference number. Then after 5 minutes they open the door and tell me to come up to the 7th floor ONLY. Up there is a middle aged lady behind a desk who proceeds to tell me off and tell me that she'd also told off the 'dark lady' who had spoken to me on the phone. Apparrently the 'dark lady' should have written her a note to tell her I would be coming. Finally her tone lightens and she summons a bloke from downstairs who takes my cheque and disappears.
While I wait she asks me where I'm going that I need my licence back so soon. I tell her it's the USA and she tells me she'd like to go one day as long as it's not New York because 'It's just like London, with all the minorities there'. She then rails against living in London, claiming that being white she's now in a minority herself (and other patently untrue facts gleaned from the Daily Mail). It is clear that this office is highly unprepared for dealing with the public.
Finally I get my licence back, and before I go she tells me that I shouldn't have been able to find this building and should never divulge its location as "All sorts of things go on in here... I mean, everything, not just paying fines." She makes this point enough times for me to get creeped out. As I get back into the lift, a genial elderly man with a walking stick joins me.I ask if he wants the ground floor too, and he says "oh, no, I'm going further down than that" and punches a code into a keypad in the lift panel, whereupon a buzzer goes off and he presses a button for the sub basement. I leave the building and run back to my car.
I'm still wondering what goes on in this building that had everyone so uptight and weird. Seeing as it's next to a courthouse I assume there are cells there, and maybe the genial old man (whom the lady and everyone else treated with respect) was some kind of manager... God knows. It was just the kind of anonymous building, not too close to the corridors of power, in which you imagine hard core spook activities going on.
At least I got my licence back, though I am thinking of inspecting it for hidden chips....

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