The festive season comes early for the traffic wardens

WHAT do traffic wardens want for Christmas?
We found out tonight down at the leisure centre, where you could hardly get a space in the car park because the fair had blocked off one end and the rest was full of stick-chuckers.
When we were young, the arrival of the fair was a huge event. It only came to Paignton once a year, for regatta, then it went to Torquay, then Brixham, then Dartmouth and then it was gone, wherever fairs go in winter.
I was never one for the scary rides, but I did love a good Noah's Ark, and Anderton and Rowland always had a good Noah's Ark, where you could perch on a wooden BSA Bantam and defy centrifugal force for a few minutes while the loudspeakers played 'Suffragette City' and the bloke in the middle hit the siren and yelled 'Do you WANNA go faster?'. And even if you didn't, you always yelled right back that you did.
And it always smelled of onions and candy floss and diesel, and the perfume of the prettiest girl in your class as she walked by.
But now the fair comes all the time, and it looks lame, and it doesn't have a Noah's Ark, and they don't play 'Suffragette City' any more.
And tonight it was parked where I wanted to park.
The stick-chuckers are in town for the championships of the National Baton Twirlers Association.
You can tell they are here by the knots of anxious parents smoking outside the leisure centre doors and the girls in their leotards racing up and down the stairs. They all have their hair scraped back and gallons of stage make-up on, like synchronised swimmers left stranded on land by an ebbing tide.
Outside after we had finished our run, the twirlers were heading home for the day, and many of their anxious parents were returning to their cars to find tickets on the windscreens.
Every now and then in a dark corner of the car park you could see the flash of a pocket camera as a warden nabbed another one.
They must have thought it was Christmas Day already.