Unhelpful

I mentioned my old pal The Bookseller in a comment on my '300' post just now - probably my favourite of all the anecdotes about him.

However, I thought it was about time I commemorated him again in the wide open spaces of a post.

Once, when we were students at Oxford, we were walking back to college through the city centre late one Friday or Saturday night, after consuming several beers, and I impetuously (oh, don't censure me - it was a lonely impulse of delight!) began kicking an abandoned traffic cone down the street. Unfortunately, there was a policeman in our path I hadn't noticed; and, feeling bored and short of entertainment, and perhaps being rather hostile to the relentless studenty "high-jinks" in that part of town, he decided to make a little bit of an example of me. Now, I repeat: the cone was abandoned in the middle of the street when I found it; someone else had already removed it from wherever it had been placed on duty. And there were, at that time, about a million traffic cones in Oxford; it wasn't as if the removal of one or two was going to constitute any public safety hazard. And I hadn't brought it very far: 4 or 5 kicks, probably no more than a hundred yards in total. In fact, the policeman had probably been able to watch me find the cone (abandoned in the middle of the street) and start kicking it.

A potentially ugly situation. The policeman wants to get all officious, give me the big lecture about how irresponsible it is to remove warning cones from roadworks. I am going to play submissive (but not too submissive) in order to get away from him as quickly and painlessly as possible.

What I really don't need in that situation is for The Bookseller to kick off the conversation by saying: "I'm sorry about my friend, officer - he's PISSED."

Oh, the irony. I'm sure The Bookseller was then - as almost invariably - even more pissed than me. Hell, he tends to sound (and behave!) kind of slurred even when he's sober.

On another similar occasion, I had spotted the police up ahead in time, and had hastily tossed whatever contraband it was we were playing with on that occasion over the side of Magdalen Bridge into the river. Two cops in a parked patrol car had spotted something, but they weren't sure what; so they pulled us up for questioning for a couple of minutes. Much to my relief, this time The Bookseller let me do pretty much all the talking, and I finessed our way out of trouble quite swiftly. As we resumed our walk home - not two yards from the open window of the car the policemen had just got back into - he observed, very loudly: "Phew, that was close."

With friends like this - it's amazing I didn't wind up in jail long ago.