This cash cow is milked more often than a Holstein. It's a soft target for a cash-strapped council and displays a distinct lack of imagination by those charged with filling the coffers.

Car parking seems to be the target of first aim for any accountant attempting to balance books. Look at Lynn's Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Now West Norfolk Council, faced with a shortfall in the cash it receives from the Government to help run the borough, is hitting the motorist in the wallet again.

I have never heard out-of-towners complain so much about the rising cost of motoring.

Past transport policies have encouraged us to live further and further away from home, out of cities and towns and in the villages. Commuter belts have sprung up and public transport has been systematically taken apart.

I live next door to a redundant train line, the trackbed now used mainly for dog walking and access to fields by farm machinery. Vast tracts of it have been built on and its original use can never be returned.

In days past I could have nipped out my back door and jumped on a train for a leisurely, stress-free ride to work, or for a day out at the coast; much more preferable to doing battle with the rest of the morning rush into Lynn each day.

Society has developed so that we don't all live close to where we work. We can't nip home for a cooked lunch and a nap before the rest of the day's labours, more's the pity. Now it's the daily drudge of the traffic-jammed journey to work and all that entails for your blood pressure and sanity, hunting for a parking space when you get there and then being stung by the cost. Lunch is pack-up or a pint and the main meal of the day still lies heavy in your stomach by bedtime. It can't be healthy.

Now, faced with a claimed £800,000 shortfall, the council has immediately come up with a proposal to slap an extra 20 per cent on car park charges. Well, that was easy, wasn't it.

Who will it affect? Everyone who has to drive into work and, more importantly, everyone who drives into Lynn to do business. And in future that will also include those coming into town in the evenings and at weekends for a meal or to go to the cinema. Can't the bean counters be a little more inventive?

And then there's the extra nine per cent you have to pay for police cover.

Which leads me on to the protest march by the nation's police in London last week. They are angry because the Government will not honour independent arbitration to fully backdate a pay rise.

The protest saw 20,000 bobbies on the beat – one-in-six of all policemen took part. Good for them. It showed strength of feeling about the injustice they belive has been done. But I have to wonder how 20,000 from any workforce managed to get a day off in the middle of the week. This didn't go unnoticed by a number of commentators, including one national newspaper which featured a picture of the massed ranks under the heading "Where are they when you want one?"

I'm not at all sure that this army of baseball cap-wearing police was the right way to gain the public's sympathy, even if it truly does have any with a public sector which has had the advantage of a 39 per cent increase in pay over the past ten years.

• How's this for world gone mad... new power lines and poles laid from South Lynn and over the county boundary to Sutton Bridge to bring electricty to power a new paper mill to be built right next door to... a power station!

It beggars belief that the German-owned Palm Paper is prepared to march poles and cables across English farmland to the French-owned EDF Energy power station at Sutton Bridge when it has an English-owned Centrica power station on its doorstep. How does that make sense then?