Why does everything happen in threes? Three days before my triplets' third birthday, I removed a clamp from my parked Land Rover. It was the third time I had tried this. It was also the third time I had been breathalysed within three weeks. This time I was arrested, and charged with just the two offences. Driving while under the influence, and Criminal Damage, no less, to a parking clamp. What followed was an evening in West End Central including three very sobering hours in a locked cell.
That was last Wednesday. In the three days since, I've had time to reflect on the ramifications.
It's not just that I will have to travel to work by tube and bus, or that I will not be able to hire a car for eleven years, or that motor insurance will cost me a packet in the future, or that I will have to sell my Land Rover and Mustang to help pay the fines, as well as raise some money, or, even, that I will never dare to drink and drive again, as any further penalty as of right now will result in a ban longer than the anticipated one year; no the real problem is that I will be unable to take Jennifer to school by car in the mornings, a chore that suddenly seems like a joy. Plus the fact that I cannot drive my aged mother down from Yorkshire again for over a year to see her grandchildren. Nor will I be able to pop out to the shops or do the large shopping trip every week at Sainsbury's, a thankless task which will now fall to my wife. Just what she needs of course, as a hard working businesswoman and supermum.
Well so much for the self-pity. I am now faced with the aftermath.First of all, of course, there is no more drink for the remaining two and a half weeks of wheelmanship left me. Any of that and my driving days are over for ever. If there is to be drinking, then there will be no driving, as the adverts have been invisibly informing me for years. Secondly, will a bike help me at all? Considering I must have ridden a bike for all of five miles in my whole life, is it a good idea to sally forth into the London traffic on one now? Perhaps I could get one to try out on the streets near home and see how I get on. Perhaps I could get one with a child seat and take Jennifer to school on it. Risking all again of course, and perhaps acceptable in summer but what about next winter? Cold, rain, ice, snow and fog on a bike with a fragile five year old on the back. To say nothing of the status problems as we draw up next to her best friend's Mum's Mercedes. Still I'm sure the image of greenness and social responsibility will carry the day. Unless there is gossip, along the lines of "He's lost his licence, you know. And got a criminal record, I hear." For indeed, I do, my fingerprints having been taken along with a mugshot of me looking no doubt as wretched as a felon finally collared after a ten year manhunt.Thirdly, how do I feel about all this, on Father's Day 1992? I still get that dreadful sense of depression every morning where the truth dawns on me that it wasn't all just a terrible dream. Every time I see my Land Rover parked outside, I think there it is the faithful old friend that has carried me home so many times, so much over the limit and what did I do? Betrayed that friendship, to get all mechanically anthropomorphic for once. Why was I determined to remove the clamp, in broad daylight in Soho Square having had three beers and a bottle of Retsina over lunch? The smell of the Retsina alone must have caused the coppers to step back a pace or two. And why was I so unlucky this time as to be grassed on by a truck driver parked across the street. He saw me, then actually called the police on his mobile phone, and then, as they appeared while I was preparing to drive away, clamp successfully eased off and left against the kerb, he called out to the police "there he is, there he is. That's the one." They must have been delighted with this display of public solidarity with the details of London traffic penalties. The only other witness offered me advice on how to jack the car up to get the clamp off. That and the odd rousing cheer from passers-by.
Fourth, there must be a reason for this. I hope it will reveal itself to me over the next year, assuming that my sentence will only be a year from July 8th, as I was not wildly over the limit. But they might take the clamp removal offence together with the drink drive offence and throw the book at me. "Your reckless behaviour while under the influence leaves me no alternative but to impose the maximum penalty granted me under the laws of this land. You will be taken from here et cetera ..." Too dreadful to consider. Now there are just two days to the court case. I've prepared a written statement of mitigation involving everything and everyone from the inconvenience of the loss of my car for work purposes and the difficulties my mother and children will face due to my immobility, but in the words of my friend the lawyer, " even with Jesus Christ Himself beside you in the dock, you'll still lose your license for at least a year". My plea reads like a truly contrite man. My excuse for attempting to remove the clamp is couched in terms of a foolhardy and regretted act. I hope my plea will be read out on my behalf. The rest is in the hands of justice, whatever that is. I have got an international driving licence for the odd occasion when I can be found abroad or in Scotland with a fully insured car to drive. The rest of my motoring will be down to visiting safari parks or other off-road arenas. Both my Land Rover and FordMustang are up for sale, partly to recover some money and in the Mustang's case - a heart wrenching sale - because the insurance that will come after the ban will be staggering. All those dreams of driving around in it on the day of my retirement seem to be fading fast.This is probably the nadir of my fortunes to date. Not only the driving ban faces me and the fines, but I am at rock bottom financially, as both our personal account and my company account are at the extent of their overdrafts and there is the Inland Revenue demand to come. The house is mortgaged to the hilt and we have no savings left. Future income still looks bleak and there seems little possibility of paid employment. This is the recession biting, I am told. Still, my life has always been a series of situations that demand a "now get out of that one" solution and this is certainly one of the more testing examples. No pools win yet, either.
I meet with the accountant on Tuesday. I take my mother's diamond ring to Christie's on Tuesday, to see if it will auction well. I enter the court on Wednesday at 10 a.m.Well, this is now Wednesday at ten minutes to midnight. Twelve and a half hours after the case has been tried and I have been found GUILTY. On both charges, of course. Since then I have enjoyed myself in alcoholic blarney. The court appearance was tense. The magistrate had long sideboards. He had a very fat assistant and a weedy, toffee-nosed snivelling clerk of the court. He asked me for my licence and took it. They all read my confession and tried very hard to allow me off, but were unable to forgive me because the law says so, the worms. So they fined me eighty pounds for the clamp business. Fifty pounds being the fine and thirty pounds costs, the present going rate I noted from the other pathetic cases in front of me. They, or rather he, then fined me two hundred and fifty pounds for the drink drive and gave me a ban for one year. Frankly the minimum. And what a lucky boy I am. Bollocks. My carefully written plea had them in tears. At last somebody has some idea what it's like in here when you're broke, busted and totally banjaxed. Some people, of course, might say, " you've brought it all on yourself". Some people might say this, of course, but some people don't know jack shit.Today is Tuesday the 14th of July. Bastille Day in France of course. Six days into the no-driving scenario. I still haven't even attempted to move my Land Rover from where it's parked four houses away. Even that makes me feel guilty. I literally am not allowed to drive. It would be just my luck to get stopped by the police for driving twenty yards. The penalty then would be prison, or at least another fine and longer ban. No I'm a bus and tube man for a year, or occasionally a lift from my wife in her car.
After a month or two, I have begun to get the hang of my fellow bus and tube traveller. On the bus down to Liverpool Street station, the passengers seem to be mainly smartly dressed blacks commuting to something in the City. The worst specimens I have encountered so far are the one man bus drivers who treat everyone who doesn't have the exact fare, or better, a bus pass, as if they are social misfits. I have never seen such a display of curtness. That and the odious way they infer to everyone else on the bus that the time taken to give me change is making them all late. Bring back the Routemasters and their chirpy clippies. On the tube I get a feeling of unease about muggers. Carrying a briefcase is an invitation to be kneed in the groin and sent sprawling in one of the long mysterious corridors between lines. However the stations and escalators seem a lot cleaner than I remember of old, so maybe the horror of the Kings Cross fire has achieved something. And then walking, walking, walking. Something I haven't done for years of course. Walking to the bus stop, down tube corridors and then grandly past Harrods. I haven't walked so much or seen so many other people in the course of a day in London for twenty years. Such have been the comforts of driving my own car in wonderful Radio 4 - accompanied luxury. Now I read the Independent and find myself thoroughly briefed on the day's events before I'm even at my desk. Weekends of course are a pain. No popping out to the local shops for a bag of nails or a potted plant. No slipping up the road for a bar of chocolate. When I'm home I'm home. Perhaps I will buy a bike for local work, although the prospect of cross town riding still fills me with dread. There's no way I can attempt Hyde Park Corner on two wheels. It was bad enough in a Land Rover.
Over a year later and I'm back on the road. Did you know you have to go to the Post Office, fill in one of those forms in tin racks and actually ask to have your licence back? I didn't until I had to. I assumed they just sent it. No you have to get down on your forearms, fill in that form and ask for it back. And pay £40 to boot. Perhaps there are people who after a year's ban decide they don't want to drive ever again and prefer a life boozing their way round the public houses of this unfair town. But all in all it wasn't so bad, really. The tube is definitely the fastest way across town. It is however rather like having your head ducked under water in a Baptist church. You feel better when it's over, but no cleaner. I still use the tube today out of choice so all wasn't wasted. Whenever I see unattended baggage however, I am seized with an irrational desire to change carriages, as if that would do any good in the awful brutality of an explosion in a tube tunnel. On the plus side, tube travel affords me the benefit of seeing the occasional tube card I've written lurking above my head, strangely unobserved by my fellow travellers.
Returning to the wheel was quite unnerving at first. Like the sensation you get when you've passed your test and realise that for the first time in your life you are driving along unaccompanied by anyone else. It was the peripheral vision that got me. Mine had obviously become more sensitive while I was off the road. When you drive your eyes must be constantly recording incoming lateral information while the brain is saying " It's OK there's nothing there right now to worry about." I had to force myself to ignore this stream of fringe trivia and focus down hard on the tunnel ahead of me. Quite soon a normal visual response returned, mercifully.
And now the confession of real guilt. I have, I have to say, had , on occasion, a drink or two and then.... driven home. Tip toeing quietly through the back streets in the dead of night. How irresponsible. How shameless. How stupid. Next time it's life, or thereabouts. And what if a child ran into the road in front of me when I'd had a few, and I hit her? Death. There'd be no turning away from that one would there? Five years in the slammer with six sodomists to a cell. Followed by the kind of remorse that lasts longer than a hangover. And while plagued with thoughts of your dreadful, senseless act, you're dying of Aids. No no no. The price is too high. And life is too short.
Julian Moseley. July 94.
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