Don't drink and defend
Feb. 7th, 2008 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
webofevilI wasn’t a huge drinker at school. Okay, so one or two of my fellow pupils were on a bottle of vodka a day and a select few would even indulge in ethanol, but even if you take them off the graph my intake was still below average.
Which is why I can easily remember the occasions when I really overshot the runway. One is pertinent here. It was a Sunday evening, I was knackered, for some reason I hadn’t had supper and I had a pile of homework still to do. So when a friend from another boarding house appeared at my door with a large bottle of vodka that he had got from somewhere cunningly secreted in his trousers, obviously the sensible thing to do was to send him on his merry way with my very best wishes.
Shortly afterwards we were swigging from the bottle in the darkness way out on the playing fields. I was keen to avoid the consequences of being caught drinking, so was trying to disguise the smell of vodka on my breath using something I had borrowed from my study-mate. This was not a happy experience. He smoked, and smokers at the school were going through a phase of experimenting with ways to disguise the smell in the event of a teacher happening by unexpectedly. (The idea was that the giveaway smell on their faces, hands and clothes would prove nothing in themselves; you can’t do me if you didn’t see me smoking it, sir. This defence rarely worked in practice.) They had moved on from Polos and Extra Strong Mints and had indeed found something strong enough to wipe out competing smells in any mouth—Oxo cubes.
Repeated swigs of neat vodka followed by bites of Oxo. A word of advice: don’t do it, kids. We all know not to mix the grape and the grain; I was mixing the grain and the gravy. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons I was quite so sick later.
If you don’t mind, I’ll fast forward through the being dragged back to my boarding house, being copiously sick in my study-mate’s bin (sorry, Tim), having to be carried upstairs as a dead (but still vaguely conscious) weight, having cold water flung in my face with no noticeable effect, which led to me being reported to my housemaster—if the senior boys thought you were a bit pissed they wouldn’t really care, but this was well beyond any acceptable limit—and having to go and see him still drunk. If this doesn’t make the hairs on your neck leap up like tiny sodding meerkats, it’s only because you, drunk or sober, never had to face my housemaster.
He sent me back to bed for being far too incoherent to bother cross-examining. (I could have told him that, if I could have told him that.) He had asked me, not unreasonably, where I had got hold of a large quantity of vodka on a Sunday night. Even in my reduced state there was no conceivable way I was going to tell him, so on the spot I made up a truly terrible excuse: I had been walking back to house and surprised some juniors who were drinking; they ran off when they saw me to avoid getting into trouble; I picked up the bottle they had been drinking from, found it was vodka and helped myself. Understandably, he didn’t believe a syllable of it—that’s if he could even make it out in the first place—but when I had to go and see him again the next morning, ashen-faced, I felt honour-bound to stick to my daft story. I got punished but my friend never did. I like to think that this in some way balances out the fact that I’ve owed him a wedding present for over a year now. Anyway.
My point is that sometimes you find yourself suddenly having to come up with a convincing story with zero time to prepare. Occasionally this can work out. More often, though, it really doesn’t, as the man at the heart of this grisly case can attest:
I can’t say I’ve ever before had particular cause to feel like my old housemaster, but suddenly there it is: there’s a part of me that wants to put Mark Dixie on a report card and call his mother. For sheer unbelievability this defence is up there with Ian Huntley’s famed “I turned around... and they were dead!” routine. Is there some online “crap defence” forum where these people compete against each other? There must be some serious prize money at stake.
Talking of prize money, now that the rules for legal aid have changed, someone of “no fixed abode” is seriously unlikely to attract the services of the legal system’s finest. (I watched Lord Falconer, then Lord Chancellor, categorically assure Parliament that the changes would not lead to a two-tier legal system, so with wearying predictability that is exactly what they are leading to.) Would Dixie even be bothering to give this story a punt if he had been assigned a better brief?
Which is why I can easily remember the occasions when I really overshot the runway. One is pertinent here. It was a Sunday evening, I was knackered, for some reason I hadn’t had supper and I had a pile of homework still to do. So when a friend from another boarding house appeared at my door with a large bottle of vodka that he had got from somewhere cunningly secreted in his trousers, obviously the sensible thing to do was to send him on his merry way with my very best wishes.
Shortly afterwards we were swigging from the bottle in the darkness way out on the playing fields. I was keen to avoid the consequences of being caught drinking, so was trying to disguise the smell of vodka on my breath using something I had borrowed from my study-mate. This was not a happy experience. He smoked, and smokers at the school were going through a phase of experimenting with ways to disguise the smell in the event of a teacher happening by unexpectedly. (The idea was that the giveaway smell on their faces, hands and clothes would prove nothing in themselves; you can’t do me if you didn’t see me smoking it, sir. This defence rarely worked in practice.) They had moved on from Polos and Extra Strong Mints and had indeed found something strong enough to wipe out competing smells in any mouth—Oxo cubes. Repeated swigs of neat vodka followed by bites of Oxo. A word of advice: don’t do it, kids. We all know not to mix the grape and the grain; I was mixing the grain and the gravy. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons I was quite so sick later.
If you don’t mind, I’ll fast forward through the being dragged back to my boarding house, being copiously sick in my study-mate’s bin (sorry, Tim), having to be carried upstairs as a dead (but still vaguely conscious) weight, having cold water flung in my face with no noticeable effect, which led to me being reported to my housemaster—if the senior boys thought you were a bit pissed they wouldn’t really care, but this was well beyond any acceptable limit—and having to go and see him still drunk. If this doesn’t make the hairs on your neck leap up like tiny sodding meerkats, it’s only because you, drunk or sober, never had to face my housemaster.
He sent me back to bed for being far too incoherent to bother cross-examining. (I could have told him that, if I could have told him that.) He had asked me, not unreasonably, where I had got hold of a large quantity of vodka on a Sunday night. Even in my reduced state there was no conceivable way I was going to tell him, so on the spot I made up a truly terrible excuse: I had been walking back to house and surprised some juniors who were drinking; they ran off when they saw me to avoid getting into trouble; I picked up the bottle they had been drinking from, found it was vodka and helped myself. Understandably, he didn’t believe a syllable of it—that’s if he could even make it out in the first place—but when I had to go and see him again the next morning, ashen-faced, I felt honour-bound to stick to my daft story. I got punished but my friend never did. I like to think that this in some way balances out the fact that I’ve owed him a wedding present for over a year now. Anyway.
My point is that sometimes you find yourself suddenly having to come up with a convincing story with zero time to prepare. Occasionally this can work out. More often, though, it really doesn’t, as the man at the heart of this grisly case can attest:
A man accused of murdering teenage model Sally Anne Bowman confessed to having sex with her after she was killed, a court has been told. Miss Bowman, 18, was repeatedly stabbed and bitten outside her home in Croydon, south London, in September 2005.Honestly, that’s his defence. The reason his DNA and, Jesus, his teeth marks are all over the poor girl is that he was wending his way home, happened across her dead body in her own driveway and, well, one thing led to another...
Chef Mark Dixie, 35, of no fixed address, denies murdering Miss Bowman.
The court heard Mr Dixie had said he had been drinking, took drugs and had “taken advantage of the situation”. [BBC]
I can’t say I’ve ever before had particular cause to feel like my old housemaster, but suddenly there it is: there’s a part of me that wants to put Mark Dixie on a report card and call his mother. For sheer unbelievability this defence is up there with Ian Huntley’s famed “I turned around... and they were dead!” routine. Is there some online “crap defence” forum where these people compete against each other? There must be some serious prize money at stake.
Talking of prize money, now that the rules for legal aid have changed, someone of “no fixed abode” is seriously unlikely to attract the services of the legal system’s finest. (I watched Lord Falconer, then Lord Chancellor, categorically assure Parliament that the changes would not lead to a two-tier legal system, so with wearying predictability that is exactly what they are leading to.) Would Dixie even be bothering to give this story a punt if he had been assigned a better brief?
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