Zambia World Wide

On reflection, it might have been unwise to threaten the slimy git with the most intrusive of bodily inspections, accompanied by interminable delay, on the next occasion on which I saw him pass through the airport, but blimey, I won the race, didn’t I? He should have been congratulating me on my brilliant racing style. As before, Fair is Fair, innit?

Anyway, the upshot of that incident was that I had to complete an admission of guilt form, accept a ten pound fine and endure a lecture from his superintendent. Tant Pis! I had experienced several of those from the Glasgow constabulary. On one memorable occasion, the rebuke was accompanied by a light caress to the centre of my DA with a truncheon, as an indication of what could happen, accidentally, of course, should I make a further appearance. They terrified me not. Cops enjoy that sort of sport and, in a perverse way, so did I.

What I failed to anticipate was that the portly little nark was also a mate of, guess who? Yep, a certain fiery managerial Mick of my personal acquaintance, who called for both the Air Miles Shagger and me to join him in his office, where we stood side by side in proven ignominy.

The first tirade was aimed in my direction. ‘So now ye’ve bin abusing the feckin’ Police’ he bellowed at me, his big, crimson, hairy, whiskey-odoured visage not an inch from mine. ‘Clearly ye suffer from a feckin’ personality disorder, where ye detest and despise all humankind’.

My feeble protest that his criticism, though succinctly put, was too broad and that only certain categories of the species qualified and that it did not apply to whole groups of the populace, females, for example, fell on deaf ears. True, sneaky, fat bastard, graceless policemen did qualify, I admitted.

It was to no avail. I will forever swear that he transmogrified into a fair impersonator of Hitler at Nuremberg. Spittle spun from his lips, which had turned opaque, his hair stood out straight at right angles to his skull and I knew that my escape from this horror would happen only if he exploded and covered both Browning and me in intestinal goo. Unfortunately, he let me down on that score. Why is there never an aortic aneurysm around when you need one?

Oddly, he then calmed a little, perhaps in deference to his own blood pressure limits, as he pronounced sentence on me. It started with being thoroughly damned with faint praise: ’Yer not the worst examining officer I’ve known’, but then rapidly went downhill. ‘In t’ way ye behave though, yer feckin’ reckless, feckin’ feckless ‘n a disruptive bleddy influence to all around you’. Worse was to follow.

‘An’ t’ere ain’t much I can do about that, other than bollock ye now and then, but when you misuse your authority to threaten members of the public (Wot? A portly, second rate sneak of a copper, a member of the public? He wasn’t even part of the human race) ye go too far. ‘Yer a danger to de public and I wan’ ye as far away from people as I can sen’ ye’.

Me. A danger to the public. How insulting…..yet strangely complimentary at the same time, appealing, as it did, to the idiot macho pride of the average 20 year old Glaswegian thug. I must confess to preening a little on hearing this, imagining the ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive’ posters ‘ Motormouth Gerry- Wanted for Gravely Insulting Plump Coppers’ posted throughout the Central African Badlands. Yep, it was aggrandising, I had to admit.