One day you go into the supermarket and the bananas which yesterday cost £1 today cost £5. Surely some mistake, you say. Prices do not go up five hundred per cent overnight.

Oh yes they do! Look at Jenny Rowlands' handy cut-out-and-keep guide to new parking charges (The Argus, August 4).

In Zones N, O, Q and R (Hove, actually) the minimum charge jumps from 10p to 50p, with more "modest" increases of a hundred percent and fifty percent higher up the scale.

In paragraph three you can find "justification" for all this but you can be sure there is no one on the planet who believes it, even if they understand it. (Go on, read it slowly. Then read it again...).

I can think of three actual motivations for the new charges:

1. Too many drivers are chasing too few parking spaces so the council has decided to milk them for all they are worth. Having created a scarce commodity out of roadside space, why not make the most of it? Think of all the tea and biscuits it will buy. As the millionaire Donald Trump said, "A gambler is someone who plays slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines".

2. There aren't enough drivers using the parking spaces - many in Hove stay empty - and it's proving uneconomic to empty the slot machines. It's a gamble but worth a try to see if you can increase revenue by upping prices.

Hard core drivers may be like hard core smokers, who aren't put off by ever-increasing prices. The tea and biscuits are safe for another year.

3. The council really does not want anyone actually to use the pay and display parking spaces and the price hike is meant to be a deterrent.

It can't quite bring itself to lay down double yellow lines everywhere but, really, it wants anyone who doesn't have a vote in council elections to arrive and leave on one of Roger French's nice shiny buses.

With bus fares up 30 percent in the past year, I am sure the bus company's profits buy nice shiny cars for the proprietors but I can't quite see how the council gets its tea and biscuits if no one uses Hove's slot machines.

I know it's complex and I doubt councillors really know what they are doing. Officials may not know either (I don't know but if I had my career again I'd become a transport consultant - they tell me you get a Merc as a perk).

But they must all realise there is a very big gap between national newspapers which tell us that inflation, houses excepted, is as low as it has ever been (two per cent, three per cent) and an advertisement in a local paper which announces price rises of an order you normally find only in economies in a state of total collapse.

Ah, maybe that is the truth about Brighton and Hove City Council.

-Trevor Pateman, Brighton