Rod Burton, of Above Town, Dartmouth, writes:

Many letters in your illustrious organ address the problem of parking in Dartmouth and I feel I should add my thoughts to this important issue.

The problem has never been out of my mind since the 1950s when my father was at the Britannia Royal Naval College.

We lived in Kingswear and every morning my mother would usher my sisters and I to the slipway to wave a tearful goodbye as he went onto the car ferry. Goodbye Daddy! Good luck! We used to cry.

But we knew he would not be long. He always came back a few hours later because of the parking problem in Dartmouth.

While he was recovering from the trauma of not finding a parking space, he would always say we needed more 'no parking' signs and miles of white lines and single yellow lines and double yellow lines and a multitude of traffic cones and timed-restricted parking spaces and a pay-and-display car park and a park-and-ride car park with machines that don't give change and civil enforcement officers to collect the cash and issue fines.

And he was sure that these innovations would solve the great Dartmouth parking problem. He even suggested that the money collected could solve the great council pension fund problem.

All of his innovations have now been implemented and it is nonsense for anyone to suggest that the Great Dartmouth Parking Problem and the Great Council Pension Fund Problem have been banished from the realm forever.

But he realised that none of these things would happen in his lifetime, which is why he always came back to Kingswear to park his bike.