Stopped and Searched

Well, what an unpleasant surprise I had last night. I was bloody stopped and me and my car searched by the police about midnight as I was returning from my friend's house in a nearby village. They said they were randomly targeting vehicles on these country lanes late at night, asked where I had been and where I was going and whether I had had a drink - I hadn't.

So he started on about whether I used drugs: I don't really know where that one came from, though he had seen my roll up fag and asked how long I had been smoking rollies. He asked me to get out of the car and to go and show my ID to his colleague and he had a quick nose around in the car. Now, I have got to be one of the untidiest person you could ever meet, but one think I do hate is people dropping litter and especially fag butts. So what I do when I am smoking behind the wheel, since my car came with no ashtray and lighter, is to twist the fag out out the window and then put the butts into my driver's side door pocket.

I don't know if I've done a proper clean out of the car since I bought it four years ago or so! I do usually empty out the big stuff in the car and do a general binning of the rubbish every so often but haven't done for a while. As a guide - he was asking about a spade in the back seat - which I put in there during the snow in December or whenever it was as I was driving up to my mothers and wanted to have one with me in case I broke down. Anyway - all this, notwithstanding my explanation that the fag butts were about my civic responsibility not to drop litter, made him decide to conduct a proper search of me and the car.

What a faff - on a pitch black country road in the middle of the night he went rifling through all the junk in my car, rummaged through my pockets and wallet and so on. Then came back and asked me, off the record so to speak, to be honest about whether I ever used cannabis. Well of course I do, but it's such a rare occurrence - basically maybe every couple of months when I go for dinner at a particular group of friends' houses, so I never have any of my own. He said "you have a habit, I notice, from the car, that suggests to me that you are a user". He wouldn't tell me what this habit was; he did say it wasn't the butts in the door pocket or the general mess, and that I'd have to work it out for myself.

Well, I haven't got the faintest idea. Unless perhaps he was referring to the fact that there was a Tesco back in the bag with half a dozen empty energy drink cans in - again the relics of several longer distance journeys over the past six months when I have stopped in service stations and I usually buy that sort of thing. So, is that it? I'd never really think of that as a trait of drug using, and I dare say that Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber wouldn't think so either!

I did notice that he didn't give me his name or number and whilst the female colleague did fill in a search form I was not given a copy - they said it was primarily for the supervisor at the station to record what they had been up to but that I could get a copy from their station (miles away in Bicester) if I wanted.

So much of a reward for going to do a friend a good turn. Do these people get off on stopping and harassing drivers for no observable reason? Jeez!