It's a fair cop

It’s not been a good week for me and my car. After 11 years of safe and careful driving (see blog below), a minor slip saw me morph into a common criminal. Cluedo style, it was the girl in the red Peugeot, on the deserted A30, with a mobile phone. Or not as deserted as I’d
thought, as the unmarked Officer Dibble behind me - the only other car in sight - took no time in giving me the flashers and pulling me over, moments after I’d managed to tell my mum
that I couldn’t talk – I was driving.

Now, dear reader, before you scoff at my carelessness, I fully understand the dangers of driving whilst distracted. A long conversation down winding local roads at school kick-out time is obviously a problem. I explained very politely that I’d ended the conversation before I even knew that it was a Police Officer driving behind me.
That I had only been on the phone moments. That I have an automatic – no changing of gears required, even if I needed to break suddenly. I even breathed in my stomach and batted my eyelids a bit. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. He was not to be moved. Crime was apparently a bit low that day and quotas are quotas.

Officer Dibble carefully explained to me that ‘tests show that driving whilst on your mobile are proved to be more distracting than driving whilst under the influence of alcohol’. It took all my willpower to suppress an aghast ‘you cannot be serious’ laugh. Was he kidding? I’d pressed a button, put a phone to my ear, said two quick sentences and pressed another button. I’m not even sure my eyes left the road. More dangerous if I’d had a bottle of vodka? Well, a miss is as good as a mile – I almost regretted not having that glass of wine at lunch time.

Defeated, I took the ticket, the fine, the points (more difficult than it sounds as the sister part of my driving license had to be sent down from East Sussex and produced within a week – a close call when my mother accidentally forgot to put a stamp on the envelope). As the tight-lipped Policewoman at the station tutted and sighed her way through the paperwork a few days later I got to wondering. How about all those times I rummaged around for a CD to play? How about when I change radio stations or laugh or joke with my friend in the car?

Distracting? Absolutely. But not illegal? No siree. Perhaps there needs to be some kind of distraction richter scale.

It’s a fair cop, guvn’r. I did, after all, break the law. But after 11 years of driving in and around the Big Smoke, never even to be pulled over, it was a bit of a slap in the face. Lesson learned, I’ve now got hands-free for my mobile. Which is even more fiddly and distracting than putting a phone to my ear, but apparently, that’s legal.