Not me

I was late for my walk this morning.

This was because of something absolutely dreadful that happened last night.

The landlord from one of the bars came across to the taxi with two very inebriated, giggling customers and requested that I get them home safely.

I knew the young man anyway, and it is my job to get people home safely. They collapsed cheerily into the taxi. The lad I know got in the front, the girl in the back. He was going all the way up the hill to Windermere. She asked to be dropped off at the cinema, which is just around the corner.

When we stopped she opened the door to get out, and the chap in the front said anxiously: “You can’t get out here, surely you aren’t going to drive home.”

She said that she was.

He tried to persuade her not to.

She was his boss. She wasn’t having any of it.

In the end I added my two pennyworth, explaining that driving whilst drunk was not a good idea, and that she should reconsider.

She assured me that she wasn’t going far and hopped out.

Her friend was very upset. He told me that they had been drinking cocktails all night and that he had promised to take her home. It would now, he said, be his fault if she was arrested.

I pointed out that taking somebody somewhere they do not wish to go is actually abduction, and that he had done his best, as had I and even the bar owner. It could not under any circumstances be considered his fault that his boss was determined to behave like an idiot.

I dropped him off at home and briefly considered phoning the police, but since I wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything useful about the car, like its make, model, colour or registration number, decided that there was no point and I would just have to drive back with extreme caution, giving anything coming the other way a very wide berth.

I went the long way round in order to avoid the route I thought that she would take, but in the end it turned out to be wasted, because when I got back to Bowness the road was blocked by several cars with enormous crunch scars in them, and my drunk, sitting in the middle of it all in the crushed remains of her car.

This is not the sort of thing that happens anywhere else other than in badly-written films. Usually people who do breathtakingly stupid things get away with them. I can vouch for that personally, having done countless stupid things over the course of my lifetime, and am not dead or in prison.

She had misjudged, hit a car at speed, spun around, hit another one, and finally come to rest in the back of a third.

Two of them were taxis.

There were some very cross taxi drivers taking pictures of the whole thing to send to their insurance companies.

The police came, and an ambulance, but nobody was hurt, except for a few bumps and scratches, and the drunk girl was arrested and taken to the police station.

She was still in custody when a fourteen year old policewoman came to take a statement from me this morning before my walk.

I felt very sad about it all. They had been having such a nice evening, and it had been a terrible end.

I spoke to Number One Son-In-Law, who had called to be encouraging about my muscle-defining project, which I thought was kind of him, and then went off on my walk.

I thought about my customers all the way round, and was glad that I have got such kindly gods. None of my idiocies have ever led to awful disasters, that one stupid decision will make a huge difference to the girl’s life. Drinking and driving has not been my speciality, but there are any number of other, equally brainless things from which I have escaped unscathed.

I breathed in the clean mountain air and thought how very fortunate I am.

I am very glad that I woke up with my life this morning, and not the life of a girl in a police cell with a hangover.