I went to Oxford today to meet some friends and ended up discovering that I am not quite as useless at pool as I remember. Still bad, though.
Earlier, we bumped into a couple of old acquaintances in an ice cream bar and after some chat, came to the realisation that out of the five of us, only one of us had not been stopped and searched by the police under
s.44 of the Terrorism Act. The only one of us who has not been stopped yet is Howard, who was the only white guy out of the five of us. Funny that.
Some comic stories came out of this:-
- A couple of days after July 7, Prashant managed to empty a train carriage to Wimbledon by the crazy method of entering it;
- Around the same time on the Tube, Raj sat down next to a man in a suit, who immediately started acting nervous. After a couple of stops the man moved two places away, at which point my exasperated friend said, unwisely as he admits:
"Right, that's really going to make a difference if there is ten kilos of Semtex in my satchel!"
To their credit, other passengers laughed.
- Around the same time, Pablo was on the Tube when he saw two British Transport Police run from the adjacent carriage to his one, charge through the adjoining door, sit either side of him, and demand to search him under s.44. Of course, every one else in the carriage panicked and moved to the other end. Searched, Pablo got off at Embankment, then, going through the ticket barriers to exit, he was stopped by another transport cop. Again, people panicked and rushed away. Pablo explained that he had already been searched and showed her the little pink form that they gave him (my favourite section is the "Intimate parts exposed" box). To her credit, the cop was apologetic - "This is just a random search..." Pablo politely asked how many white people she had stopped that day; she politely ignored him.
- When Raj and I were stopped when he was dropping me off at Manchester Piccadilly station last July, as the policemen were filling in our forms, Raj turned to me and asked "What build has he put you down as?"
"Medium." Raj smirked. "Ok, what has he put down for you?"
"Slim." Vain git. As professional as ever, our protectors paid no attention to our banter.
Gawd Bless Our Royal Constabulary!
In other British cop news, two days ago in Liverpool the singer in my youngest brother's band was detained in a police van for twenty minutes and fined £85 for "Threatening Behaviour" after approaching six of them standing against the wall and making the comment "Takes six of you to prop up a wall then?"