Sunday 1 February 2009

Police!!

I've done it, I've broken the law, I am now a criminal. My crime, the most despicable of all, talking on my phone, whilst driving….
I can see the concern here in that because I'm using my ears and mouth to have a conversation, I may spontaneously develop colour blindness and not be able to decipher the traffic light system. Or become so engrossed in my chat that I inadvertently forget all my years of driving experience and that you're not supposed to drive on the pavement and collect people in your grille. Of course the kind officers with whom I dealt with didn’t see it this way and said something about using both hands to drive, or whatever.
They caught me fair and square but I feel the handbrake turn and consequent chase through traffic with lights and sirens were a bit "OTT" considering the level of my crime. I saw them coming in the opposite direction, they saw me, saw the phone. I looked in the rear view to see them spin around, hit the lights and give chase, funnily enough I then dropped my phone. At this point I did what most people do and pretended that I hadn’t done anything and wasn't in trouble, I stared straight ahead, turned up my stereo and wound down my window (trying to create circumstances unsuitable for phone use to reason with later). I then did the surprised "who me?" sideways glance as the rozzers pulled alongside me to "persuade" me off the road. The only place safe to pull over was a car park in the middle of a retail park, surrounded by a McDonalds, Curry's and Focus DIY, and lots of shoppers. After it was made clear they would not be coming to me, I was beckoned to the car, and then redirected to the other side, and then to get into the back of the car. It was a big Volvo T5 meaning that to talk to the nice officers I had to hold on to the backs of the front seats and lean forward like an excited child trying to see the interesting stuff his dad did to make the car move. They asked why they'd pulled me over, I did think "if you don't know I'm not going to tell you" but common sense won the battle, well almost, I tried to blag it. "I bet you saw me answer the phone" "Yes you were on your phone" " I literally picked it up to say I'm sorry I'm driving, I'll call you back" "Then Sir, that beggars the question why answer to say you can’t speak?"
Shit, this clearly wasn't going to work. So after the textbook chastising and belittling about hands free kits, they gave me a ticket for 3 points and a £60 fine. I said was worried about the effect of the points on my insurance, this was the following conversation between the two coppers. "Well, IF you choose to declare it, it won’t matter anyway, I got 6 points and it didn’t affect me" "6?! Is that all you got, I've got more than that and mine's not affected"
I didn’t have any until you two jokers pulled me over! It's not a competition!! I thought "bloody hell I'm in Superbad! That makes me Mclovin!" And one of them was a fellow strawberry blonde, what ever happened to solidarity?

1 comment:

PAULB said...

So you were nicked Nick! Reminds me of those old Jim Davidson nick nick jokes. You should have played safe and carried a big bomb on your roof rack, THEN they'd v ignored yu. P.