I left Dublin bright and very, very early on a Sunday morning with the two children in the back seat, leaving himself asleep in the bed. It was gorgeous morning – clear and crisp – and there was barely another car on the road. All was well with the world. It felt good driving through the country at that early hour, passing by all the houses, their occupants tucked up in their cosy beds.
But not everyone was tucked up. Around the same time I’d been getting out of my bed back in Dublin, a young man had been getting out of his somewhere in North Cork. At the crack of dawn, he was up, washed, shaved deodoranted and dressed in his uniform of blue and, bright-eyed and busy-tailed, had reported for duty at the Garda Station of a certain North Cork town. Then, following instructions, he took the patrol jeep, drove off until he found a nice discreet spot, and lay in wait for law breakers – i.e. speeders.
Who knows what he was thinking while he sat there in his jeep. Maybe he was thinking, “Now, isn’t this the life? Getting paid to sit here doing nothing much. Sure, there isn’t a sinner on the road.” Or maybe he was thinking, “Jaysus! What was I thinking, joining the guards? Only an idiot would be up at this hour on a Sunday morning.”
Meanwhile, rapidly approaching in his direction was another idiot who wasn’t thinking about anything much at all after hours of driving and listening to, ‘She’ll be coming ‘round the mountains when she comes – HEE HAR!’ – not out of choice but because it was the only thing that stopped the little one from crying. Still, with the Galtees now dominating the landscape, there was a certain aptness to the words of that song.
Anyway, I guess as I approached this North Cork town where our friend was waiting, I was speeding. Actually, there’s no guessing about it, I was speeding, at least according to the legal definition. I wasn’t doing a Shumaker or anything but, under the law, speeding is speeding is speeding and a couple of kilometres over the limit is the same as fifty.
And as I ‘sped’ through this slumbering North Cork town with it’s deserted streets, I spotted from the corner of my eye my friend in his patrol jeep but didn’t take much notice and ‘sped’ on.
He took notice of me, however, and when I glanced in the rear view mirror, there he was – right behind me. Unaccustomed as I am to being followed by the police, I naturally, assumed he was in a hurry to get back to the police station, perhaps for a Sunday morning fry-up. I wondered why he didn’t just overtake me and then the penny dropped. Those flashing blue lights were for my benefit.
So I pulled over. Sitting there, I watched in the wing mirror as he climbed down from the jeep and walked towards my car in a slow menacing kind of fashion. From watching so much television I half-expected him to shout, “Mam, can you kindly step out of the car with your hands in the air.” But he didn’t. Instead he leaned in my window, and politely asked me if I was aware I was speeding.
Anyway, the upshot of it all is that I got a ticket. What can I say, only “fair cop, guv”.
But, three days later, when I was doing the reverse journey back to Dublin I was so obsessed with sticking to the speed limit that my eyes were almost crossed-eyed from constantly checking the kilometres on the dashboard. Meanwhile, cars, vans, motorcycles and even the odd juggernaut whizzed past me, cursing me under their breath most probably for travelling so slowly.
So the question I have is, where was my garda friend then?
