Don't Hold Your Breath

I must say, reading the news that Kent's finest are to breathalyse every driver involved in a crash had me in stitches! So much so that the old glass eye popped out and is currently being batted around the study by Bertie, my pedigree Burmese.

And the reason for the hysterics? Well, have you tried getting Her Majesty's Testicle Scratchers to attend an accident recently? I have, and they don't. Regular readers will remember I was rammed up the jacksie by a white van man on the A2 last December. A call to the rozzers elicited the blunt response 'We will not be attending.' And a while back, when I was, er, dismounted from my throbber by an inattentive hit and run driver, a similar call to the constabulary was met with the advice 'We're too busy to send anyone. Just take down witness details and report them to your nearest police station.' Not so easy to do when you and your two-wheeler are splayed across a main road in a number of irregularly shaped pieces. But hey-ho, they did offer to send the ambos over, which is something I suppose. (The offending driver turned out to be uninsured. Not that the cops discovered that, or did anything in fact. I had to don the deerstalker and do all the sleuthing myself to bring the rapscallion to justice!)

So forgive my cynicism when it comes to this new initiative, which looks more like a PR puff than anything which might actually be put into practice. A shame really, as these days, every time I see them charging down Victoria Parade with the blues and twos blaring, I imagine they must be on their way to an important pensions meeting, or that a nice bit of Battenburg has just come in at the nick canteen. No wonder the crime stats are falling. We've all learnt from bitter experience there's no point picking up the phone to the plod in the first place.