Dear Reader column: Parking up the wrong tree!

Perhaps it’s an age thing.

As regards proposals by North Yorkshire County Council to charge for on-street parking in Harrogate on evenings and Sundays, as someone who drives into the town centre regularly midweek after work, I don’t particularly want to start paying to park on streets with plenty of spaces.

Nor does it seem right that parishioners should be taxed on the way to church on a Sunday morning.

But more is at stake, clearly, than my aversion to putting my hand in my pocket.

Someone somewhere seems to have forgotten that Harrogate’s economic prosperity is built largely on leisure and tourism.

Town centre strategies, local government masterplans and traffic management schemes do matter.

But the real effects of these baffling webs of jargon on real people and real businesses matter more.

David Bowie vinyl night shenanigans

I whipped off my slightly festive knitwear jumper to reveal a David Bowie T-shirt which was a bit skinny for me.

It was the best moment of my Bowie tribute set at Ten Devonshire Place’s vinyl-only night last week.

Overall, the performance was my most amateurish yet. I didn’t see the point of trying to compete with the event’s host, the effortlessly professional DJ Trev.

One of my fellow vinyl aficiandos somehow got away with playing some James Last but it was good to share the decks with old friends like Rachel Gregory and Renee Dickinson.

In a break between DJs, the latter told me all about her days as a young journalist in the music press in London in the 1970s.

Lucky thing, she seems to have met everyone, even David Bowie, if I remember correctly. Maybe not.

Nowadays Renee Dickinson is the chair of Parkinson’s UK Harrogate and District Branch.

Perhaps the rock n roll generation was the giving generation?