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Ten years ago my father suffered a heart attack.

He never regained consciousness.

Those are the stark, clinical details of another life gone.

My memories are more clouded, less stark and clear.

There was the 4am phone call from my sister.

The jumping in the car for the long drive from London to Treliske Hospital in Cornwall.

There is a section of the M3 where the traffic came to a standstill which still brings back memories every time I drive down it.

The unbearable frustration of being stuck in a long queue of cars knowing that each second could deny you a chance to say goodbye.

(Image: Apex)

When I did arrive at the hospital my father was on a life-support machine.

Although we had been told he would never recover, it was impossible, especially for my mother, to give up that hope.

So we sat, nearly for 24 hours in the end, waiting for his organs to fail and for him to die.

Why am I sharing this?

Because every few hours I had to leave the ward and feed the meter in the hospital car park.

The money was not the issue even though it was extortionate: £16 a day.

I could afford that though many others cannot.

What angered me - and still angers me today - was the intrusion.

It only took five minutes to walk from his bedside to the car park and back but in those five minutes his breath could have stopped.

In those five minutes I would not have been there to comfort my mother.

This was a time of intimacy, regret, tenderness and grief.

And, although it was a small, inconvenient thing, having to pay for the hospital parking intruded on that moment.

Which is why I can only have contempt for the Tory MP Philip Davies.

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Despite having made a pledge to speak up for carers in Parliament he spent 90 minutes today effectively killing a bill which would have stopped carers having to pay for hospital parking.

Frankly, it is not worth venting any fury at Davies.

It is barely worth pointing out his lack of compassion or his emotional distance from anyone who may have voted for him.

His sadness is he revels in his unpopularity and stubborness.

Let him dwell there.

I am writing this because I am fortunate enough to have a platform on which to do so.

But also because my experience is not unique.

It is not just carers who should be exempt from hospital parking charges, everyone should be.

There are friends whose partners have spent months in hospital with cancer who have racked up hundreds of pounds in parking fees.

There are people on little money for whom £16 is a sizeable chunk of their weekly income.

But above all it is intolerable that at a moment when people are traumatised by loss or fear, and nobody visits a hospital for fun, that their trauma is made worse by the petty indignity of having to pay for parking.

Anything which could be done to make the experience of visiting someone who is sick or dying easier should be done.

And that includes free parking at hospitals.