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Dangerfield's Exaggerations. · Feb 15, 2026

Travels in Idiotsville

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Chris Dangerfield · Dangerfield's Exaggerations.

If you haven’t bought my novel yet, maybe check the reviews and writer endorsements on the Amazon page.

Here’s the link: Love in the Time of Nudie Mags.

Here’s the damn story…

Here’s a man riding a glass bottle of shark that will continue to make no sense once you’ve finished the story.

I’ve never liked cars. I’ve pretended to. I’ve been lying for no reason for as long as I can remember. I’ve been with people, and some flashy-looking motor drives past, and I’m all, “Now that’s a motor!” because it looks like something I’ve seen Sean Connery or Steve McQueen drive in a movie. A nightmare if someone I’m with starts giving it all that - it’s got nothing on the 1968 Twin-Block X5… Jesus Christ, is he still talking about cars, because then I’m all out of bullshit. I was out of bullshit at “Now that’s a motor!” - that was effectively just bullshit fumes.

In parts of India, Nepal, and Africa, there are documented cases of people inhaling bullshit fumes to get high. Imagine all chipping in a few quid for a Friday night blow-out, and the lowest-ranking mate of the group you sent out to score returns with a carrier bag of cow shit.

The high is really oxygen deprivation and toxic exposure. It can kill you pretty quickly, too. And here’s the kicker: it’s often a multiple-death situation because other people rush in to save the first victim, and the bodies just pile up. So, if you happen to see someone face down in a pile of cow shit, let them be, for this is a fart-high of the satanic type, and your friend’s lack of proper ventilation will lure you into that trap, and death will become you.

“Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
(
Matthew 15:14, ESV)

Maybe I’ll start saying “Now that isn’t a motor!” Or just hang out with people interesting enough that I don’t have to lie. Yes, I’m blaming the company I keep for my being a bullshitter.

However, I don’t know enough people who can maintain interesting conversations, so I’ll fall at the first hurdle. I’ll probably just side-step from the likes of twin turbos to: “Have you ever seen a goat surfing a train?” That pretty much takes care of itself from there. Unless they say yes, in which case that friendship has passed its expiry date and no longer serves any purpose in my life. If you dare lie to me about seeing a goat surfing a train… No. I’m not having it. A gentleman has standards.

I once stole a goat. Then I painted it blue. I was tripping on LSD. My mum interrupted that scene with the news of my dad’s death… Now that isn’t a motor!

My dad used to race grass track bikes with Steve McQueen. Well, twice or something. He died before I got the chance to ask him. My mum’s line was always the same: “He liked your dad because they talked about bikes, whereas the other blokes wanted autographs and to talk about movies.” I bet there are widows all over England trotting out that line about grass track bikes, their dead husbands, and their half-minute special relationship with Steve McQueen.

Steve McQueen (left,) riding a 1920s Douglas Flat Twin alongside my dad (right) at the Knatts Valley Hillclimb, Kent, near where my dad lived. Not really. McQueen’s on the left and the other fella could be anyone except my dad. (Photo: Max Poultney)

I was driving back from London to Totnes, Devon, with a car full of crack. ‘Full’ is an exaggeration, but it may as well have been if we were measuring it on the years-to-be-served-at-Her-Majesty’s-strangely-unknowing-sadistic-pleasure-o-meter.

Crack is cocaine hydrochloride without the hydrochloride salt, which is why it’s also called freebase - you’ve freed the base cocaine from the hydrochloride salt so you can smoke it.

Yawn.

For such a strong, and I mean criminally understated, stimulant, it’s one hell of a bore to write about. You could do something else, go make some money or something. You’re going to need it for they’re crawling out of the drains just after dawn to eat your children. Cocaine was originally for injection, being water-soluble, and it’s one massive kick in the balls of your soul-penis when you spike the stuff. Smoking it, though, when the hydrochloride salt is out of the picture - crack - is even better. Or worse, dependo on your perspectivo.

I’d picked up seventeen ounces of cocaine, gave it a wash, freeing the base from the constraints of the hydrochloride salt, and ended up with nearly twenty ounces. How, you ask? From whence came these three extra ounces more than were at first reckoned? It’s alchemy, I tell you. Kill the witch.

It’s called The Stretch, and for my sins, for a few years in South East London, I was known as the best stretcher around. Sensual.

Making crack means using bicarbonate of soda, or some other proton-hungry Brønsted-Lowry base such as ammonia, to make la magia chimica happen. You don’t want to use ammonia for The Stretch though, because it actually makes good crack. With bicarb, what’s happening is this: it removes a proton from the hydrochloride salt in the cocaine and turns it into sodium chloride, table salt. The bicarbonate collapses into CO₂ and water. Once the water is poured away and the CO₂ has taken flight into the atmosphere, Bob’s your skint, thieving, toothless uncle.

So, from whence came the three extra ounces? It’s simple: instead of pouring away the table salt in the water, only use enough water to dampen the cocaine, meaning there’s nothing to pour away. You also use too much bicarb, enough to convert the hydrochloride and free the cocaine base, but also enough to sit around and bulk up the product. There’s base cocaine in there. There’s bicarb in there. There’s table salt in there. The Stretch, my friends - how to wash cocaine and make it dirtier.

Properly made crack melts like wax. Wave a flame over it, and it disappears, usually through a gauze packed with ash and into the lungs of someone who can do little else, except find the money to smoke more. Dirty, rubbish crack doesn’t. It goes black, your heart sinks, and you’ve been had for another twenty quid. This is why The Stretch is an art, and why I was paid handsomely to stretch kilos of the stuff. When you can turn one gram of cocaine into one point two grams of crack, you can turn one kilo of cocaine into one point two kilos of crack. An additional two hundred grams, with a street value of about twenty grand. Lovely.

However, if you get The Stretch wrong - even slightly - the crack won’t melt. The punters go elsewhere. And you’ve got a load of really expensive rubbish. You’ll still try to sell it, of course. Then you get stabbed, or hung up from a tree by your ankles, and your arms broken. You see, once too much bicarb and/or table salt dries in with the cocaine base, it’s no longer a bit of surface muck you can fix with heat or rinse away. It’s a physically integrated mixture. You can’t just re-wash it to magically save it. You’ve fucked up.

HAHAHAHAHA. If crack looks like cheese, it may just as well be.

The Stretch - when correctly executed - behaves and feels like crack but is really like topping up your dad’s vodka with water, only with saucepans, blowtorches, bicarb, six track-suited gorillas watching you, and no sleep, ever again. Get it right, and you’ll make a fucking fortune.

NOTE: That ‘make a fucking fortune’ I just mentioned. You would if you could sell it, stretched or not, at least as fast as you can smoke it. But you can’t. However hard you don’t try.

Gold Plated Crack Pipe. 1988. Bronze with gold plate, 21.4 x 15 x 6cm, by Keith Coventry. I met Keith at The Colony Room Club a few times. Off his fucking nut.

My Mrs at the time was a bitch for the stuff. She didn’t have people putting guns in her mouth and all the crack-adjacent things I got to enjoy just to keep things ticking over in a horrific manner, allowing her to sit at home, passive-aggressively absorbing huge amounts of crack while listening to the FBI on the intercom, who were planning to abseil down the outside of our building and come crashing through our windows. The FBI was not the FBI, though. It was the snaps, crackles, and fizzes of electronic interference we always heard on the intercom. But when you haven’t eaten or slept for two weeks, and your lungs are breathing more crack than air, reality isn’t.

We were doing about twenty grams a day. Not The Stretch either, but connoisseur crack, made with ammonia. The nuts. Pure freedom of the base. It doesn’t merely free the cocaine base… it emancipates it. Nothing’s too much for my queen. There’s no table salt in our crack, thank you very much, madam. But it’s never for retail, the ammonia wash. Fuck that. I’ve got debts to pay.

Crack debts.

Mainly hers.

All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you.

I learned about Brønsted-Lowry bases from a stinking, dishevelled, and homeless thirty-two-year-old crackhead called Paul. The last time I saw him was on a train to Abbey Wood, going to score, but his head was like a football, with his face painted onto it; round, too big, flat features - I mean, his head was already too big for his nil-by-mouth body, but this was a more severe attack of large, round head syndrome. Treading carefully, I asked, “What the fuck has happened to your head?” to which he replied, “Cancered-up, ain’t I,” which suggested he’d taken it pretty well.

I’ve made a couple of references to driving. I wasn’t driving. I can’t drive. So, really, I was passengering back to Totnes, Devon, with nearly twenty ounces of crack stashed in the car. ‘Stashed.’ Ha. Ha. Hardly. It was just out of sight, in ounce lumps, distributed carelessly, nay, flippantly, all around the interior of the vehicle. Under and behind the glove compartment, stuffed into the back seat seam, a few under the seats. You get the lack of idea. The point being, not in any way ‘stashed’. A more precise word would be ‘put’.

So…

I was passengering my way back to Totnes, Devon, with about twenty ounces of crack put in the car. It’ll be fine. Crack gives you that sense of alrightness, while your life is crumbling around you, people are trying to kill you, you owe nearly a hundred grand, and you’re losing about two kilos a week of whatever’s left after the heroin stole all the muscle you never had. It’ll be fine.

Me and the driver also both had about a quarter ounce of heroin on us. You can’t really do one without the other, crack without heroin, anyway, although the odd one-in-a-million genetic anomaly does. I don’t know how or why. They’re like bread and butter, heroin and crack. Well, they’re like drugs and drugs. But you know what I mean.

I wasn’t shooting heroin then; neither of us were. We smoked it, à la ‘chasing the dragon’, ‘riding the tiger’, ‘sipping from the Chinaman’s nightcap’, ‘slapping the gazelle’, ‘tripping the light fandango’, ‘forgetting my childhood arse-fucking’, etc. But as I said, we had heroin on us too, because crack takes you so unbelievably high, it makes snorting cocaine seem like some homoeopathic health fad. But at altitudes on the crack-o-meter being on the cusp of outer space, you know you’re going to have to pay the piper. You always have to pay the piper, and with the jaggedy, cold-blade-falling, icy-touch-of-decay hand of hell gripping your neck, it’s tempting to just put another twenty quid stone on the pipe, suck yourself back stratosphereward, and pay the piper five infinite minutes later. And while that doesn’t sound unreasonable due to the quantity we were carrying, IT. WILL. ALL. GO. So it’s cheaper to smoke some heroin occasionally - come down easy - than plough through a hundred quid of crack in about twenty minutes, every twenty minutes, on a six-hour drive. I mean, I’ve got to sell some of it, if only to keep the me and the Mrs in heroin and milkshakes.

Point being, there’s a cornucopia of screwed-up and soot-covered pieces of tin foil scattered about, a couple of fresh foil squares with a melted beetle of heroin waiting to be used, and a couple of expertly made foil tubes so we can recycle the heroin that sticks to their inner walls while ‘frosting the paddywhack’, ‘goosing the deacon’, etc.

I once watched Sensation artist [redacted] draw a portrait of The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan in heroin trails on foil at The Colony Room Club. Then she puked. I miss that place.

Heroin and trails on foil. Photo nicked from an article about the government giving out free foil to help ‘addicts’ kick the habit. Yep, that’ll work.

The Sensation exhibition. Absolute nonsense. It showcased the best - sensational - Young British Artists of the time. Who could have possibly decided who they were? Charles Saatchi, marketing guru, who, with his brother Maurice, had already been buying, promoting, and, bluntly, manufacturing a sensational art moment for years. Charlie had been collecting work by - weirdly - all the artists featured in the exhibition. The show was framed as shocking, confrontational, and anti-establishment, while being bankrolled and curated by one of the least confrontational, shockless, establishment figures imaginable. The absolute balls required to buy a load of crappy student art, store it away, then use your money, contacts, and prestige to convince the world they are the best and brightest new Young British Artists. And it worked; it was - and I’m coughing this up with some real sticky phlegm - sensational. You see, when you have the money and contacts, you don’t so much achieve success as organise it.

The show blew up. Public outrage, protests, tabloid hysteria, questions in Parliament - all the moral-panic boxes ticked. The Royal Academy came close to losing its royal charter, and several works were physically attacked. Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait (a huge image of Hindley’s famous mug-shot style photo, made up of children’s handprints) was splattered with ink and eggs. That told ‘em. I thought about doing a huge image of a child’s handprint made up of tiny photos of Myra Hindley, but the irony clock was ticking fast in the postmodern, Baudrillardian days of the art-world’s Britpop moment, and I missed the boat. The drugs probably played a small part in my not getting it done, too. And a few other things. Everything else, actually. It’s a full-time job, not working.

Myra (painting) - Wikipedia
Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait. Sensational, apparently, but neither here nor there when compared to Hindley and boyfriend Brady’s well-documented pastimes.

After London, the Sensation exhibition toured to Berlin, then hit the Brooklyn Museum in New York circa ‘99, where it became even more combustible. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to defund and shut down the museum over Chris Ofili’s painting of The Holy Virgin Mary, chiefly because it incorporated elephant dung. I think there’s a case to be made that Chris Ofili was not in a well-ventilated space when painting The Holy Virgin Mary, and accidentally huffed a load of cow shit fumes, which he ended up throwing at his painting. Religious symbolism often causes people on drugs to freak out. But then, people on religion tend to freak out at drug symbolism.

Lawsuits followed. Attendance surged. Outrage did its work, turning a group of young British artists and Saatchi’s influence over them into an international phenomenon. The grease of The Culture Industry, like watery, old spunk from Charlie Saatchi’s penis, sprayed all over the art world, which is another term for the business of creativity.

Have you ever thought what separates an art exhibition from a marketing campaign? Mainly, that art is both the campaign and the product, rather than some carbonated drink. Hardly a substantial distinction. But significant, because the big thing in the ‘80s was to make art you couldn’t sell, art you couldn’t hang up on the wall of a Frank Lloyd Wright semi-subterranean maison de unique - art you couldn’t take to market. The fault in the system was that this only worked until your unmade bed, your flies scooping meat from a cow’s head, or your plaster cast of the negative space inside a house made you famous, and once you’re famous, the first thing you do is cocaine, sorry, the first thing you do is monetise your fame. Then cocaine.

You know something? All this talk of cocaine and crack, even after all these years, still makes me a bit jittery. The whole world of pain, insanity, chaos, and fear it sucks you into is somehow always there, breathing down your neck. It’s like a permanently set trap you’ll not see until there’s blood dripping from your hollowed-out and moth-infested soul.

Years later, Charlie Saatchi was photographed strangling his then-wife and every man’s fantasy TV chef, Nigella Lawson, outside Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. Saatchi accepted a caution for assault, and a decree nisi was granted to end the marriage. Decree nisi is an anagram of ‘Nice Eiders’, an eider being a type of bird, the female of which plucks ultra-soft feathers from her own breast to line her nest - if you know what I mean.

Nigella Lawson - daughter of one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson - being strangled by her then-husband Charles Saatchi outside a London restaurant. Under oath she said, “I am now totally cannabis, cocaine, any drug-free” when referring to life after Saatchi, who she described as having subjected her to ‘intimate terrorism’. I know the feeling, Nigella, if you ever want to talk about it.

Melted heroin looks a bit like rosin, that stuff string instrument players use on their bows. You may have seen it as a kid; it’s that amber coloured goo that oozes from the damaged bark in some trees and sets hard. Some dealers cut their heroin with it. It’s one of the better cuts, in fairness, since most of the time they’ll use whatever’s to hand; brick dust, coffee, Caligula’s ear wax.

You’d assume rosin is to keep the hairs on the bow smooth, to play the instrument, but it’s actually there to create friction. Probably creates a fair amount of friction in your lungs, too.

Rosin. It creates friction. I once met a girl at a bar, and she invited me home. She was a cello player, and watching her bow that beautiful instrument between her beautiful legs was an incredible experience. When she’d finished, rather shyly she asked, “What do you think?” And I said, “I’ve got an erection.” She asked me to leave.

And now there’s an unmarked police car behind us flashing its blue lights behind the grille.

We had a crack pipe made from an asthma inhaler and some silver foil punched with tiny holes. It was Sellotaped to a metre-long clear tube so the driver could smoke crack while driving. I prepared the pipe in between my knees, out of sight, piled on the ash, dropped on the crack, and lit it. He just had to hold the tube in his mouth and suck. And then he didn’t know anything worth knowing or not knowing if ever a thing were possible.

Anyway, the police.

The driver said oh shit or something, I can’t remember exactly because I hadn’t slept for a thousand years, and no doubt also said something like oh shit/fuck/balls, perhaps all three several times, and wouldn’t have heard him anyway. But instead of putting his foot down, as I expected, he pulled over. I bet he was going to say the crack was all mine. I wouldn’t have blamed him; I was going to say it was all his. His car, his crack. I’m just a hitchhiker who happened to strike it unlucky.

Then I remembered I also had nearly eighteen grand on me, gathered from product sold before leaving London. That’s not easy to account for when you’re on the dole.

I once had the Dole Police rock up to my house when I was living in Leeds. Due to a computer glitch, they hadn’t paid me for nine months and wanted to know why I hadn’t noticed, and what I’d been living on. Imagine getting busted by the dole for not getting money from them. I said it was because I was signing on at six different job centres in six different names and was growing and selling weed, so I had plenty of money. Not really.

I told them to wait there, shut the door, ran through the house, grabbed a few essentials, a bag of cash, and left through the back door, never to return. I did have to immediately evict a Chinese student from a room two streets away - a lad called Robert Chow - as I assumed I was also not getting housing benefit for him on the same blag account. He looked pretty pissed as me and a mate shoved everything he owned into a duvet cover and threw it out of the window while telling him to run for his life because government stormtroopers were coming to kill him.

A photo I found on Linked-In of a geezer called Robert Chow. If that is you, Robert, use the Buy Me a Coffee donation QR code for the memories.

The window winder snaps off in my hand, so I have to push my fingers through the just less than finger-wide gap and jiggle it side to side to pull it down. The driver is busy stashing heroin paraphernalia under the rubber foot mat on my side. He tore the foil from the inhaler and the inhaler from the tube and tossed it all over his shoulder. Yes, it all smelled of crack (think hospital floors, and love,) but it’s only a tube, and a partially melted inhaler now. Hardly evidence. The nearly twenty ounces of crack, half an ounce of heroin and all that cash though - I mean, I’m no lawyer, but on a bad day with a judge before lunch (see: “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions.” Danziger, Levav & Avnaim-Pesso, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011,) I think all that, with a decent prosecution, would almost certainly be considered ‘evidence’.

“What’s that?” says the copper. And as I survey the king-sized Rizla, the packaging torn to pieces, a pack of cigarettes, and several free cigarette papers gently trembling in the wind, I am reminded there’s also about a half ounce of Lebanese hash in the car, well, in the ashtray now, because the driver just threw it in there and closed it just in time. ‘Just in time’? The vehicle is a mobile dispensary for the chemically challenged. Deary me.

“What’s what?” I say, as if it’s the first time I’ve seen the dashboard of hash-smoking paraphernalia. That or I’m blind. And for a few seconds, I think pretending to be blind might actually get me out of this. “I don’t know, officer. Ask the driver. I assume he’s got working eyes.” That would support the ‘It’s all his’ defence too.

“All that,” he says, his arm now half through the window, and his uniform smelling like it’s been sprayed with something so he doesn’t have to iron it, which is handy since the wife divorced him. Come on, it’s obvious. Early twenties, overachieving to fill a love-shaped hole in his soul, already in his unmarked car being mentored by some coffin-dodger who looks like Nietzsche playing dress-up.

“Step out of the vehicle,” says the other copper, the boss, who I could tell was the higher-ranking copper because his uniform had more silver-coloured plastic badges on it for that very reason. And that white moustache that says something desperately hollow about authority.

“We’ll split them up,” Boss cop says, pointing along the hard shoulder, “Take him up there.”

He walks me about twenty metres away from the vehicle and the driver, past their car, and all I’m thinking is, well, you had a pretty good innings, son, but now you’re getting banged up, and for a Very. Long. Time. ‘Personal use’ isn’t going to cut it. I should have brought the Mrs along. Her blood cocaine levels might have tipped the ‘personal use’ scales in my legal favour since all she does is sit on her arse looking like a three grand a night whore, the occasional blowjob, but mostly an endless suckjob on the crack pipe. She has a pile of rocks on the table in front of her at all times, and starts panicking if it goes below about six grams, like the world is going to end because she’s only got about sixty pipes left.

“Listen, mate.”

‘Mate,’ what’s he on?

“I don’t give a shit about drugs,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said, because… I don’t know why I said that.

“The truth is, I think all drugs should be legalised, I’m just going to pretend to search you, because I can’t even be bothered to do that, but if you’ve got any drugs in the car, tell me, and I’ll make them disappear, no bullshit, I just don’t need this.”

Ha. Haha. Hahaha.

Even if he’s being honest, I’m not quite sure how he’s going to make twenty ounces of crack, half an ounce of heroin, and all the cash disappear. By the time we return, Boss cop will likely have a magnifying glass on both eyes, his pig snout sniffing the leatherette seats, and the effects of years of school bullying making him desperate to play his money-and-time-wasting part in a moral panic.

He taps me a few times on the wads of cash. You’d think loads of cash would be loads of cash. It is not. It’s always a disappointment. It stinks, too. The thought of the many disgusting things that have migrated from disgusting hands onto those disgusting notes in the vile and unwashed disgusting world in which they circulate is like some nightmare about a forensic carnival at the abused and bloodied arse-end of a civilisation-wide collapse.

AI-generated image of eighteen grand split in two. It’s not that big in reality. This is the problem with Artificial Intelligence: it lacks artifice, therefore intelligence.

The situation is not ideal. I’m not going to skip out of court with a spring in my spiritual step on a conditional discharge. I’m going to be pushed down the courtroom stairs and tumble like a napalm-induced fairground abortion into Tartarus. Shit, that sounds awful.

“There’s a lump of hash in the ashtray,” I said, knowing it was pointless. I think I just wanted to show some appreciation for his frankly generous offer, which, if we only had the hash, would have been very helpful.

Lebanese hash made from the compressed THC trichomes of the Female cannabis plant traditionally grown in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.


“Right, I’ll grab that, and we can fuck off and forget this bullshit.”

“Sounds good,” I said, and it did sound good, like your favourite record sounds good at your funeral. And he led me back to the car.

My driver was standing by the roadside. He was a gaunt chap at the best of times, but right then, he was hauntingly pale, and his name that sat on him was Death.

Boss copper had the driver door open and was pulling on a pair of black rubber gloves. Who I’m reluctantly going to refer to as ‘my copper’ from now on, gave me a look as if to say, ‘Sorry mate, looks like I’ve missed my chance to grab your hash,’ so I gave him a look as if to say, ‘You’re alright copper, it would have been like putting a bandage on a decapitation once your pig colleague finds the real truffles’.

I glanced at my driver, who was still dead, and in any other situation, I’d have administered CPR. Did you know, there’s a thing that surgeons do, which makes CPR look like child’s play. They cut open the dying person, grab their heart like some Voodoo bullshitter and squeeze it. Not for fun, well, not just for fun, it’s part of bringing the owner of the heart back to life. Imagine coming round to that.

Boss copper pulls open the ashtray. There’s joint butts, cigarette butts, ash, and the lump of Lebanese hash that’s being knocked around by the end of his Bic biro. I can see it; the dead driver can see it; my copper can see it, but the Boss copper doesn’t seem to notice. I’m so annoyed by his incompetence that I want to say, ‘It’s there, look, bouncing around like a pinball every time you dig your stupid pen in there.’ I do not, though, because he gives up on the ashtray and lifts up the rubber foot mat on the driver’s side. It provides nothing, which suggests he’s about to lift the foot mat on the passenger side. My dead driver looks at me, tears of the netherworld rolling up his face and back into his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” I say. Hahahahaha.

As Boss cop lets the driver’s mat flop back down, the ribbed design on the mat looks like a smiling face, which is nice. But then, as predicted, he reaches for the rubber foot mat on the passenger side, the one that’s covering heroin tubes and foils. Signposts, essentially, that point to a thorough search of the entire vehicle, and bingo - we are fucked. And as he lifts it, I see the bright, reflective corner of one of the heroin foils…

A police radio, a voice, some beeps, an emergency. Boss cop lets go of the passenger’s foot mat, the one inch he’d managed to lift before the call came through, and as it slaps down on the heroin foils and tubes, it has the same happy ribbed expression as the other rubber foot mat. I’d never noticed those quasi-facial patterns before. Someone designs those ribbed patterns for vehicle foot mats for a living. Probably goes speed dating too.

Boss cop walks away from the vehicle while conversing on his radio. My copper looks at his watch and shakes his head. Boss copper walks back over to us.

“Right,” he says, and like a scene from Dad’s Army unfolding in front of me, continues, “I think one of you two is concealing a controlled substance. And I think that person is… you,” he says, pointing at me while slowly rocking back and forth on his impressively polished Boss copper issue shoes.

What am I supposed to say? ‘Ah, it’s a fair cop, guv. The car’s full of crack,’ and extend my arms for cuffing.

Luckily, I don’t need to say anything, because it would appear, by some unfathomable quirk of reality, he needs to be somewhere else.

“We’ve been called to an incident, an incident that requires real police work and not wasting time with the dumb, irresponsible doings of two druggies.”

Whoa! That’s a bit much. But I’ll take it.

“We do not tolerate drugs on our manor,” he said, which was interesting because, as he said it, he was at once proving it to be demonstrably untrue.

“And should we happen across you again, you won’t get off so lightly.”

And with that, he spun ninety degrees on his heels and started marching back to their vehicle.

“DS Morgan, a man dressed as a Roman Centurion, is redirecting traffic the wrong way at the Wisley interchange, causing all sorts of havoc. The M25 will be gridlocked in ten minutes unless we stop him in the next five!”

They got in their car, sparked up their blues and twos, and at what looked like 0 to 80 in no seconds, were gone, just a cloud of dust and some grit landing on my driver’s car bonnet to remind us they were ever there in the first place.

1999 Jaguar XJR V8 Supercharged

“Now that’s a car!” I said.

“Yup, Jaguar XJR, Eaton supercharged V8. Instant surge. No lag. Officially limited to 155mph, but in reality can pull well past 170 with favourable tailwinds. A car like that looks bored at speeds that would rattle most cars to pieces.”

“Please kill yourself.”

“I need a pipe”

“Me too”

“Have you got any?”

The End

Chris Dangerfield

Thank you for giving this a read. I really appreciate your time. I also appreciated LIKES and COMMENTS, but a RESTACK is the golden touch.

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