Twerp

We had a tiresome night last night.

An irritating little twerp of a policeman stopped Mark.

Mark had come out of a blind junction and stopped, in some haste, because the policeman was driving down the hill. He did not nearly hit him or anything, nobody had to swerve, and Mark had got customers in the taxi so he was driving reasonably carefully. You do this when you are a taxi driver. Episodes of high-speed lunacy are reserved for when you are by yourself.

Much to the irritation of Mark and his customers, the policeman stopped and got out, and said that he was going to breathalyse Mark.

Mark did not smell of alcohol because he had not been drinking, neither, obviously, was he swaying or slurring his words for exactly that reason. The policeman was very small, and skinny, and about fourteen years old.

He might have felt somewhat diminished when Mark, who is six feet tall, got out. The customers shouted and made a fuss and wanted to punch the policeman, but didn’t, and went to the nearest pub instead.

The policeman, who just wanted to be a tiresome nuisance, said that there would be half an hour’s wait until a breathalyser could arrive, and made Mark hang around at the busiest time of night waiting whilst another policeman brought a breathalyser test from the other side of Kendal, which took three quarters of an hour.

The landlord of the pub, who is a splendid sort of chap and who, incidentally has just had a baby, came out and offered Mark an actual drink to help the time and the breathalyser go with a swing, but Mark declined.

I came up from Bowness and told the policeman, who was actually even smaller than me, what I thought of him and looked at the pictures of the pub landlord’s very nice new baby. She looks like him, except for the moustache, and is obviously prettier.

The policeman shifted uncomfortably when I reminded him that any breathalyser done after half an hour was probably pointless anyway because any alcohol would have had plenty of chance to wear off by then. I knew this because I had called Lucy and she had told me. Then I took his collar number and told him I was going to make a complaint.

I have forgotten his collar number now but I will make a complaint anyway, irritating little twerp. I think I preferred the days when all policeman were eight feet tall and ignored you unless they absolutely had to, at which point they threatened violence and told you to buzz off.

Eventually the breathalyser turned up and Mark blew into it and was not surprised to discover that he did not have any alcohol in his bloodstream. The policeman, who was not even born when Mark started driving a taxi, said that he could not think of anything that he could charge him with, since it is not exactly an offence to be impatient with an irritating little twerp of a policeman. Mark explained that this was because he had not done anything illegal, and so they parted company.

I was very cross. The policeman hung about for the rest of the evening, presumably in hopes that we might actually do something illegal and he could catch us, but we didn’t. Well, he didn’t, anyway.

It made for a wearisome evening, and in the end we finished early so that we could have an actual drink and go to bed, which we did.

In other news, Oliver’s school report has arrived. His best results were for Dance, except that he has got to remember to point his toes. I liked that bit. Also although I have not exactly re-written any of Symon the Black and his adventures today, Lucy has saved me the trouble and written it for me. It is like my version but different. It is jolly good. I might steal some of her ideas.

Apart from that I have baked cakes, got dinner ready, dusted and hoovered and flapped about worrying about my interview tomorrow. I looked up the interviewers and discovered that one of them is a Canadian poet. I was downcast by this information, as my attempts at poetry are long in my past because they were utterly rubbish. I looked online for some of hers and found it, but was chastened to discover that I did not have the first idea what it was about. It was lyrical and symbolic and full of lots of modern young woman mystical images.

The problem is that my idea of a jolly good poem is Hiawatha, with its ace rhythm and endless story, or maybe Ozymandias, which is also brilliant and has the advantage of being short, and I quite like Alexander Pope, who was another example of a short, poisonous little twerp, now I come to think about it.

I am lost, and if I am honest, bored, with un-rhyming descriptions of trees and wombs and reflections, even if they have won awards. It appears that I am a philistine in my inner soul.

I might not do very well at this interview.