I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I came round the copper and the police doctor were looking pretty appalled at having had to hang around for so long.
Lying on my back waiting for my pelvic girdle to knit afforded me time to consider how fortunate I was that I hadn’t killed anybody and wonder what the magistrate was going to say. If the blood sample was positive, I was looking, at best, at a disastrous three-year driving ban, a substantial fine, more than 100 hours of community service and a place on a re-education course. While I was unconscious, I must have sobered up, however, because I heard nothing more from the police, and I was so grateful for the let-off that I vowed not even to think about drinking and driving again. And I’ve kept to it.
Living ten miles away from a decent night out means always staying out overnight and driving back the next day, which in turn has meant an overfamiliarity with Trev’s battered sofa. But lately, tired of presuming on Trev’s hospitality, I’ve looked for alternative sleeping arrangements. And one of the dirt-cheap, no-frills upstairs rooms, patronised by labourers, available at one of the town’s pubs, seemed the ideal solution. This arrangement worked well until I fell from grace by returning late after a party too discomposed to negotiate the stairs, and spent the night face down on the saloon-bar carpet. The broad-minded landlord wouldn’t have minded this so much. But there was a small amount of sick, reasonably attributed to me, which left a smell so pungent and indelible, he said, he had to go out and buy a new carpet.
His spoiled carpet rankled with him, and for a time I wasn’t welcome in his pub as a customer, let alone as an overnight guest. There were B&Bs in the town I could have used instead. But I decided not to risk it. The thought of reeling uncontrollably around in the hall of Sea Breezes at four o’clock in the morning, and laying waste to the china ornaments, was too much. So I stopped going out. Which, one might argue, given my inability to drink calmly and sensibly, was not such a bad thing.
Time, however, is a great healer. A couple of months later, I ventured into the pub at lunchtime for a swift one and the landlord was cordial. I apologised for the carpet and he chuckled and said it had wanted replacing in any case. When I offered him a drink, he said maybe he’d have a small scotch for his rheumatism. And about a month after that, when that feeling came upon me again that if I didn’t go out and get drunk I’d go mad, I rang him, and he said, yes, I could have one of his rooms at the usual rate and he’d start putting down groundsheets right away.
Well, we had the usual Friday night out, Trev and I, nothing special. We went to the pub, then a reggae night in a rival pub, then a house party, then I returned to my accommodation in the pub. I’d lost my coat, but on the plus side I wasn’t in the least bit queasy.
I negotiated the pub’s front door and the stairs with ease, found my room, removed my shoes like a good boy, and inserted myself between the sheets. And that could have been the happy, redemptive, Hollywood ending. But in the night I did that weird, half-asleep, half-awake thing, where I opened my eyes, forgot where I was, panicked, felt my way around the room for an exit, missed the door and found a sash window, pushed it up and climbed out on to the roof, broke several tiles and put my foot through the roof, retrieved my foot, climbed back in through the window, relieved myself on the carpet, and went back to bed. I managed to dry the carpet with a towel in the morning, and replace the tiles at least to give an appearance of continuity, but I don’t think I’ll trouble the landlord for a bed for the night for at least another year.
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