The wet nose of the law

I've seen enough teevee programmes with titles like 'police, camera, beating', 'cops 'n' cars', or 'you're nicked scum' to know that if an officer asks you something you don't make a run for it and hide in a dustbin (thermal cameras will find you), you don't try and hit the policeman (CS gas) and you don't answer back (taser).

I have also seen a documentary about police dogs. These come in two flavours - Alsatians who do 'crowd control' (a dog is snarling at exactly crotch level - do not antagonise) or the rather dopier sniffer dogs, usually spaniels, who are trained by sniffing out treats and so look wildly happy whenever they find some bloke with semtex or smack down their pants.

However, I love dogs, especially gundogs and spaniels in particular are a family favourite.

Which is why, when I was walking through the station past a half dozen policemen and their sniffer dog, and the dog came up to me with his tail going wildly, my natural reaction was to lean down, ruffle his ears and say 'hello!' In that special 'talking to dogs' voice.

His handler was not amused. Apparently it's not the done thing to fondle an officer's ears when they are on duty, especially as the dog loved it and the tail started doing even faster.

His handler, rightly assuming that I was unlikely to be capable of carrying enough drugs to elicit that sort of response from the dog, growled 'just keep walking' and I strolled off with that 'just patted a dog, feel pretty cheerful' feeling, while pondering if my trousers might have the same chemical signature as crack. Or bacon.

The wonder of Sherlock Holmes

When one sees real detectives on television, they are rarely smiling. Usually they stand there in a reasonably smart suit and a tie the wife picked out for them because they were going on telly and read out a statement that means some family’s life has, or is about to be, shattered.

This is at odds with the other sorts of detectives we see on television. These ones have very good suits, drive fast cars and have complicated home lives, love lives and so on. They are often very good at their jobs (they must be to wrap up every case in an hour or so) but this professionalism comes at a cost, possibly they are divorced, possibly they drink too much.

Back in the seventies, complex character flaws were not as important as how quickly you could drive through a stack of cardboard boxes. Anyway, back then everyone was drinking, smoking and fooling around – if you had a character flaw back then it was that you were bald or fat. Never both.

Of course fictional detectives exist in other media, in films and books. They all share a common trait – they are all good at their job and solve crimes – this is because if you get to the end of the book and the detective is still doing door-to-doors and having conversations like ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue about this one’, then you might reasonably expect the reader to feel a little dischuffed.

The one place where books have the edge over film and teevee is fruity language. I toyed for a long time with the plot of a novel involving a detective with tourette’s, who was booted off the force after a particularly disastrous episode where he had to break some bad news to a grieving young widow and now lives on a barge (check) has a flirty relationship with his ex (check) and never has anything in his fridge when his spunky young daughter comes to stay (check). However, I abandoned it after a scene where he asked a bartender for some information ran to seventeen pages and involved 156 bloodys, 284 shits, 752 fucks and a monumental 7,000 cocksuckers. Predictably, it also ended in a bar brawl. Come to think of it, most scenes ended in a fight.

The greater the flaw, the greater the genius. This is why a cocaine using recreational sodomite who is lazy to the point of indolence is widely accepted as the greatest fictional detective of all time. Sherlock Homes is fantastic in print (where he doesn’t swear but by Christ, smokes and tokes like there’s no tomorrow), great on film (Rathbone and Bruce. Greatest Homes and Watson. Ever.) good on television (Brett is sublime) and marvellous on radio. Indeed, such are the strength of the stories that if they invented a new media experience which involved enjoying a story by shoving a chemically sodden sponge up your arse that released the story directly into your bloodstream, it’d probably be great on that too.

Homes is the most extreme example of the flawed detective. Detective who doesn’t have anything in his fridge? Fuck that, Homes doesn’t have a fridge, he has a landlady who makes him his meals…which he then doesn’t eat. He’s the perfect imperfect detective for the media age. Yet his imperfections mean that he can only be trusted to investigate the most unusual of cases. Had a run in with the red-headed league? Homes is your man. Relative savaged by an enormous spectral hound? Off to Baker Street. Suspect that people are conspiring to bump you off based on arrival of orange pips in the post? Send for the man in the deerstalker.

Which is why flawed detectives with genius in inverse proportion to their flaws are great in print but less so in the real world, if Homes were on Crimewatch being quizzed how he intended to tackle the Bromsgrove bullion job, then I’m not sure how well the response ‘I intend to take a seven percent solution of cocaine, smoke the very strongest Turkish tobacco, starve myself and scratch out a tune on my violin’ would go down with Scotland Yard.

The answer to climate change...take a flight to somewhere warm?

I’m confused about climate change. I thought that we were all supposed to be concerned about global warming. Global warming was, apparently, going to result in the UK being like the Mediterranean. On the one hand, I like the idea of doing f**k all work in the afternoons and tapas, on the other hand it might mean that our cars get smaller and women get hairier.

Looking out of the window on this August evening, I don’t see many olive groves sprouting. Indeed it’s pretty hard to see anything, what with the wind lashing the rain against the window like that.

Now, this is not global warming, but climate change. Climate change results in severe weather events like rain in summer. Frankly, anyone who’s had experience of the British summer might consider that rain in August is situation normal and the only emissions we should be worried about are people talking out of their arse about climate change.

So hand-knitted home-made hats off to the climate change protesters at Heathrow who have set up camp to try and raise awareness about the dangers of air travel. Well done them for tying up police time and public money with quite the most pointless bloody protest since I staged a sit-in for extra ribena at play-school.

‘Deluded’ is the word that springs to mind. Looking at these tossers on the news I was a little shocked to see that what I had assumed to be a cagouled troll was in fact a person, who was spouting off about air travel being bad and who was ‘demanding to be heard’.

Okay. 1. Stand as an MP. 2. Get elected. 3. Vote against air travel. 4. Get enough of your mates to do the same and end the problem. Or…spend the weekend in a damp camp pooing lentil curry into a latrine you’ve had to dig yourself, getting pissed on home-brewed scrumpy and wearing a sweater you’ve never washed with detergent in order to save the environment.

The truth is that the best we can do is manage air travel and that nobody is interested in direct action tossers. The last big protests, marches through London and so on to do with airports were when airport expansion was being mooted. Lots of middle-class people saw the threat of large reductions in the value of their properties and the possibility of tyre-marks on their roof if the pilot came in for a low-landing and they rebelled. Result - no new runway.

You want to see people truly exercised about air-travel? Ask anyone who lives on a flightpath or who has ever had a cube of blue-ice the size of a fridge land like a meteorite in their greenhouse (tip – get rid of it before it melts!).

And if you want to be taken seriously, get a shave a suit and a job.

A professional protestor in uniform – you know love, you’d be quite pretty if you washed your hair, used some make-up, dropped a stone and wore a nice dress. How on earth does she think she’s going to attract a bloke like that?

Life (and death) in the fast lane

Travel in the modern world is, with a few exceptions, a pretty dreadful experience. Away from magazines whose pages have a glossy petrochemical sheen that makes you doubt their recyclability (unless its into other glossy magazines) and who link travel with first class air tickets or expensive cars, your average journey is usually just the dull bit between setting out and getting there.

Even the most luxurious modes of travel try hard to convince you that you are not actually travelling. Seats on aeroplanes now fold into beds to fool you that you are in a very small dorm room and allow you to studiously ignore the couple having sex in the next bunk, while cruise liners do their very best to pretend they are not ships at all but merely hotels with hulls. Why else would a ship have a pool? You’re in the ocean! The ‘this way to swimming’ signs should be pointing over the side.

Even if you’ve got an incredibly posh car, it’s unlikely that you’ve got a private motorway and so you are likely, at some point, to be stuck in roadworks, counting cones and watching the family in the car in front squabble. Luxury cars are not designed to make driving a pleasure, they are designed to make driving that bit more bearable.

The only way to really enjoy travelling is to be on a boating holiday where the whole objective is to get from A to B as slowly as possible, punctuated by many visits to waterside pubs, or get a push bike. The bicycle is the best travelling device ever - something that allows you to move swiftly from location to location while feeling gratified that you are getting their under your own steam. It also means that, unlike car drivers, you can have a flexible attitude to the interpretation of the Highway Code with especial reference to mounting pavements, haring across green spaces and being able to go up and down stairs.

The mode of transport I’ve never been able to understand is the motorbike. The motorbike seems to combine all that is worst about a bike - exposure to the elements, lack of a glove compartment, vulnerability in traffic - with all that is crap about a car - can only go on roads, costs lots to run. As I see it, the only reasons for owning a bike are: you have a beard and need an excuse for it, you are a man over 40 and as such the only leather you are now allowed to wear is a biker outfit or a gimp mask; or you have just turned 40 period.

Bikers have always annoyed the hell out of me - either as couriers in town or, worse of all, the way in which they thread between slow or stationary traffic on motorways. Maybe there was a time when a bike could do that and not be a nuisance but today, with bikes roughly the same size as an overstuffed sofa, it means that you have to move your car to let them through.

I recently learned the secret of surviving traffic - snacks! The last time I was in a traffic jam I had a cool box stuffed with crisps, chocolate and cold drinks. 45 minutes sitting in the fast lane? No problem, just listened to some tunes on the iPod and consumed about 40,000 calories. If I had not been thus occupied and, it’s true, reduced to a dazed state by all the fat and flavourings I was getting down my throat, I would probably have been able to register annoyance at the behaviour of the occasional biker shooting left and right of me.

This then, is the most probable explanation for the murder of a biker on the M40 last weekend. A biker was shot and the whole motorway was closed for a few hours. Inconvenient for those in the traffic, very inconvenient for the biker. Police think he may have been shot as the result of a biker feud after attending a biker rally. Me, I think that the guy spent a weekend with his biker mates and, on a high and considering himself king of the road, undertook and overtook and pulled all sorts of cheeky manoeuvres on the way down the motorway until he pulled that shit on somebody with a short temper and a long barrel on their illegal firearm.

Police intend to spend the summer visiting biker rallies and will probably complete the investigation short of suspects but with plenty of new gear for the cycle cops. As a line of enquiry it’s a pretty good one, certainly better than working on who has a grudge against bikers - they can start with pretty much the entire DVLA database. Me, I’d look for the car with the sticker on the side in the shape of a silhouette of a biker’s helmet.