ULEZ

We left Norfolk yesterday, and headed towards London to visit Brian’s mum. We had been making good time, but then the weather changed and it started to chuck it down with rain. The roads soon became very water logged, and we must have been driving through the rain for a good couple of hours.

On arrival in London we realised that we needed to register for the new ‘ULEZ’, or ultra low emission zone. Apparently all vehicles driving inside the north and south circulars need to be registered with TfL to confirm their emissions category. This is calculated using a Euro scale. Whereas in France, even though you would suspect the Euro scale was widely used, we are registered for emissions using ‘CritAir’, so we immediately had a mismatch. If you are not registered with TfL you have to pay £12.50 per day, so we were keen to get registered. We went online and began going through the registration. We stumbled at the first step, when our car reg wasn’t recognised, as it was a French number plate. Undaunted we continued with the manual registration. Brian eventually found what Euro category we were and that took us through to the last hurdle – they needed a scan of our log book. Used to the difficulties that arise with travel it has become habit with me to bring everything, and it just so happened that that included our logbook. Brian scanned it on his phone and uploaded it as a pdf – hoorah! However, they said it could take 10 days to review, but today it was confirmed that our car is exempt. Amazing!

We woke this morning to blue skies, what a difference a sleep makes.