Rumour is said to be a lying jade but it seems the rumours flying round about the Albion's tenure of Withdean are probably only too true.

In spite of promises, long forgotten, as to the length of their stay in the middle of a delightful residential area, not only are they staying for some years to come but are applying to increase their audience capacity to just over 9,000.

This, of course, means more stand capacity and more traffic in an already bursting network of roads. But rumour also has it there are going to be more parking spaces available. There are?

Those of us who have to suffer the wretched incursions into the roads around Carden Avenue greeted this piece of information with a hollow laugh and then started wondering where these parking spaces were coming from.

Imagine my surprise, not to say gob-smackedness, when a reader contacted me to say that the top end of Carden Avenue above Crowhurst Road was going to become an overflow car park with capacity for some 120 cars.

Feeling sure that my informant had been lunching on magic mushrooms, I started asking around and found that indeed there is a plan to send all non-football traffic into Crowhurst Road, along a narrow road where there is already considerable on-street parking, round the back of Asda, on to the roundabout and thence down the hill to the already crowded A23 or over the bridge to Lewes.

We are talking about Saturdays, when Asda is likely to be very busy with a continual stream of cars, which will get tangled up with the football supporters as 120 fight for a space.

There are also other retail outlets in the area - Matalan and MFI to mention but two - and Saturday is the day for family shopping.

It has all been dreamed up with, as far as I am aware, no consultation with the residents of Carden Avenue, who will see an already busy main road become a nightmare as the queues build up and the tailbacks start forming.

I stand to be corrected but I cannot recall reading anything about closing a very heavily-used piece of road until Adam Trimingham's article last week. Mill Road is already closed to accommodate a considerable number of cars, next is part of Carden Avenue - and where next?

It is nonsense for the directors of the club to say the fans are well behaved and keep the rules. Everyone who parks a car illegally, who throws their unwanted rubbish and worse into local gardens, those who break into the nature reserve in order to avoid paying for a ticket to watch the game, are letting the club down and no one in authority seems to want to do anything about it.

Brighton and Hove has an enormous influx of visitors on fine Saturdays and Sundays and the traffic on the A23 is reduced to a crawl as the cars are forced into a single lane near the city.

Many elderly folk look forward to a visit from relatives at the weekend but simply getting into the area is going to become more and more difficult as the parking in Carden Avenue forces cars back on to the main road and that silly mini-roundabout.

I'm no mathematical genius but even I can see that an extra 120 car parking spaces is not going to make much difference to the parking of 2,000 more supporters. It is hard enough now to get out of Carden Avenue but it seems to me that you ain't seen nothing yet.

And if, as that lying jade is whispering, there are going to be some Sunday games as well, a fair slice of Patcham looks as though it will spend the season in purdah with a pillow over both ears.