114
THE BLUNT END
Summer 2019 Truck & DriverTal es of driving,
dar ing and disaster...
H
aving just retired and (almost) hung
up my driving boots, I have a lot of
time on my hands. As I reminisce,
rose-tinted specs in place, I’ve
decided it might be time to share
some of my brushes with the law.
I’ve said here before that I’m an ex-copper,
so I’m well aware of how to behave when I
speak to members of the constabulary. Fail the
‘attitude test’ and your finances may well suffer
badly in the aftermath. Following my departure
from ‘the firm’ in 1987, around the time of a
major shift in policy that favoured the rights of
thieving little scrotes over those of honest
working people, I took to driving trucks for a
living. I worked for about 10 years for a now
vanished general haulage firm, known on the
CB as the ‘Muppet Road Show’. Times were very
different back then. We had a lot of fun, great
camaraderie and were generally very busy
little teddy bears. The police tended to leave us
alone unless we drew attention to ourselves.
And so it came to pass that early one Monday
I was heading for County Durham with my new,
shiny Volvo F12, fully freighted and hauling a
full load of fizzy pop south from Glasgow. Not
the most direct route, I grant you, but it involved
a little visit home. It was a beautiful morning,
radio and sunglasses on, arm out the window
and, er, flat out. Bear in mind, these were the
times before speed limiters and we had
analogue tachos that could have been fiddled
easily by a reasonably clever toddler.
As I passed by the
airfield just south of
Wooler in
Northumberland, I
was passed by two
Geordie truckers
heading north
towards Scotland
and saw they were
chatting on the
‘Chicken Box’. I
flicked through the
channels and found
them just in time to
hear, “Jesus H, thatsmokey is motoring!” I instantly checked my
mirrors, just in time to be blinded by a blue
lights display! Ooops. The driver of the Vauxhall
Cavalier 4x4 patrol car (the car kinda dates the
story) whose interest I had caught pulled me
over and quickly joined me in my cab. “Well,
driver, what speed do you reckon you were
doing as you passed me?” Frankly, I hadn’t a
clue where I had passed him so I threw my
hands up in surrender and said I didn’t know.
“Well, I make it 57 in a 40!” “No contest,” I
replied. There then ensued a desperate
grovelling, fawning and generally pleading
conversation that ultimately saved my bacon
(pun intended) and my wallet.Force’s favourite
After some industrial name-dropping, it turned
out that my nemesis had previously served in
the police in Scotland in a neighbouring division.
Better still, we had mutual friends and started
reminiscing about the ‘Old Days’. Before you
could blink, the ticket book disappeared and I
received an ‘official caution’. Phew. We were
chatting and got round to the reasons why I had
come to be the object of his affections on that
particular day. It transpired that, a few days
earlier, PC (Anon) had made an evening trip to
the cinema in Newcastle with his lady wife.
On their way home, a Muppet Road Show
artic had appeared in his rear-view mirror at
some speed. He accelerated to put some
distance between them and, like a scene from
Duel, the truck quickly caught him up. All he
could tell me was that the vehicle was a ‘Wendy
House’ Scania. As my employer had only three
of those, all 113M models, I had a fair idea who
the culprit might be. After his Close Encounter
(see, another Spielberg reference), he vowed to
nick the driver of the next vehicle he saw from
our company. Which just happened to be... me!
I spoke to the other driver, suggesting he might
avoid intimidating car drivers when he had no
idea who the occupants might be. He claimed
he was “just in a hurry”. The moral of my story
is, treat all other road users with respect, as you
never know when your bad behaviour might
come back and bite you... or me!In the distant past, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, truck drivers were
a very different breed, made from sterner stuff than us mere mortals
DAVID RUSSELL
Retired truck driverShutterstock