Can this be right?

It’s Friday night and I am the equivalent of the little old lady driving home from church except it was the book club where in true Oxford style we’d been discussing modern French literature (and one of our number had read the book in the original French) Anyway, drink had been taken in the most moderate of fashions; a small glass of rose in my case and I’d turned down any top ups which was just as well. On a wide, well-lit road with about four cars on it I come across a middle England road-block and am pulled over by a policeman. I get out of the car and he asks me if I’ve had a drink (just a wee one officer) and if I smoke. Kind as it is of him to enquire after my lifestyle, healthy or otherwise, I was pretty put out to discover that I was expected to blow into a breathalyser. The first effort didn’t apparently work and I was gasping like a beached dolphin. I had to do the whole thing again n so I blasted till I was dizzy and the light went green. Then I was allowed home with a tube like a discarded tampon dispenser I’d been given “for a souvenir”.

My niece tells me that I the police can’t breathalise innocent ladies if they say they haven’t had a drink and aren’t tottering all over the place. Is this right? On Friday nights in Oxford I’d think there might be more to do. I found the whole thing strangely disturbing. I don’t like to carry on with the “respectable matron and mother of two” line as it is very unflattering I think but on the other hand I resent the apparent withdrawl of any of that old style assumption of innocence in one of greying hair (although obviously I dye it). I never used to be picked up at airports for example (apart from the brief period when I closely resembled one of the Bader Meinhoff gang, a notorious group of German anarchists taken to kidnapping and murduring people). My long-haired husband was always picked up but not me. Now, it’s me that’s picked up by hairy chinned women security officers at Chicago.

It’s about time I applied to Hell’s grannies I guess although I am not a granny as such. At least, I don’t think I am. But what do I know. Next time, and I recommend this, the reply to the drink question will be “just a little communion wine officer”.