Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, January 14, 2004
SOBER REMINDER OF NEW YEAR
SOMEONE just popped her head around the door and chirped, "Happy New Year!" - a bit late, if you ask me, but she has only just returned to work from holidays and the gloss has yet to wear off her 2004. "Did you have a memorable New Year's Eve?" she asked. As a matter of fact, I have a crystal clear memory of the entire evening. I drove to Middleton to spend the night with friends at their beach house, only to be told the New Year's Eve gathering was now at Victor Harbor, which meant at least one of us had to drive there. For some unfathomable reason, I nominated myself and drank lemonwater all night until my passenger, too tired to scratch herself, insisted on leaving ... at 11.30pm. I even missed the fireworks over Granite Island. Next morning around nine o'clock, I headed back to Adelaide and ran into the police RBT unit waiting for drunken revellers who had fallen asleep on the beach and then thought they were okay to drive home. Pulling off the road behind the witch's hats, I had the usual twitch of hard-wired Catholic guilt as the senior constable approached. "Good morning, sir, lovely day," he said. "Yep," I said, choosing my word carefully to avoid giving away information that might incriminate me. "Would you blow in here, please, sir, until I say stop - one long breath, thank you." The cop never told me the reading but since no alcohol had passed my lips since Christmas Day - another of life's little mysteries - the reading must have been zero or even less. Anyone who passes through a breathalyser on zero should get a month's bonus car rego. "Quite night, sir?" he said, looking at the breathalyser and then at me. "Yep." He chuckled softly, possibly meaning "sad git". I was retelling my martyr's tale over lunch in Gouger St as the waitress tried to open a Stelvin cap with a corkscrew. Hopeless. One thing led to another, as always happens with RBT anecdotes, and my companion Ken told of the occasion he had helped a mate to paint his lounge room. At the end of a hot and tiring day, they each downed two stubbies in quick succession, packed up, and drove around the corner into an RBT station. Both blew .05. The last time I saw Ken was at a wedding where he was yelling, "I'm bulletproof, I tellya, bulletproof! That last beer didn't even touch the sides!" - so he has some experience in the matter of excess alcohol. Even so, I had my doubts that anyone could blow .05 so quickly. Then our female companion, a woman not prone to exaggeration, said she had just one glass of wine at lunch, went to pick up her kids from school at 3.30 and also blew .05. No mention of the three gins for breakfast. For me, it's either no beers or nine these days. But I know what I'm like and do not drink-drive, not counting the unfortunate parkland incident involving my bike and a tree. One more drink at lunch and I walked home.
