Just Another Quiet Night Out
Hello, you have got through to the answer phone of David FitzGerald please leave a message after the tone and I will read about in the News of the World later.
It has been a funny couple of weeks. I like the idea of an arrest warrant being issued for Colonel Gaddifi. It is all very British. Somewhere on the wall of Tavistock Police Station is a poster with a picture of him and the words WANTED. I can just imagine some crusty old bobby wandering up to him in Tripoli and saying ‘Come along sonny, you’re nicked….’ Actually is he Sunni or Shiite?
Speaking of police, I ran into an officer a couple of weeks ago who attended an incident outside a Chinese restaurant about seven years ago and the memories came flooding back. My family had just left said establishment and were trundling past the door in the car when my wife shouted brace yourself. She had noticed another Ford lurching round the corner behind us and had anticipated the impact…..and she was right! On exiting our crumpled car, I discovered a charming young man of about seventeen blinking at me from behind the wheel of a battered Escort. Beside him, a heavily painted woman twice his age. After a short conversation, where I may have read him his horoscope in Anglo Saxon, it transpired that he was sixteen, obviously had not passed his test and was only driving because he was too pissed to walk. On top of that, the car belonged to the (young) lady who he had met that evening and had been negotiating a price for the continuation of the date when the accident happened. I remember saying, as the police turned up.. ‘So….let me get this right…..You are too drunk to stand so are a driving a car which isn’t yours….without insurance, a licence…. and tax, by the way… with a prostitute… who I notice is trying to slide over into the driving seat claiming that she was behind the wheel…..but is obviously as plastered as you, as she hasn’t noticed that she has her seatbelt on and therefore is going a bit red with the effort…… this is quite a night out…Your Mummy will be pleased.’
In a statement to the officer a little later that evening…..I was asked for the driver’s description. ‘Five foot eight, slim build and the result of vicious inbreeding,’ apparently was later read out in court. I say apparently as I was not asked to attend the hearing.
My father, god rest him, had staggered from the back of the car and was immediately surrounded by the staff of the Chinese who offered him and my mother chairs and cups of tea. Father turned down the tea and asked for a brandy. Relaxing on the pavement, he began to watch the Monty Python style scene as a full transit van load of coppers turned up who just happened to be on a training exercise in the area. Eight got out with shiny new notebooks and I heard my father mutter… ‘Wow….this is some response.’ Then overhead, Oscar 99, the Devon and Cornwall force helicopter, dipped over the city centre relocating to its Plymouth base but father was now in a brandy flavoured world of his own… ‘Helicopter! Now I am really impressed.’
Later that evening as we packed the family back into three quarters of a Ford Focus and drove back home with the tailgate dragging on the road, I could hear father muttering…. ‘Brilliant evening…food, alcohol, women in uniform….oriental women, a fight…bus on fire…marvellous!’ I didn’t quite get the bus on fire bit until I noticed that driving towards us was indeed a double decker with the entire rear half shrouded in smoke with a single tongue of flame coming up from the engine compartment….
I never did check… and my father and mother are now gone….but I am sure that some members of my family must have had 666 on some part of their person..no one else could possibly go out for a quite Chinese meal and end up in Die Hard movie.
