Cars, Seats and the Spanish Inquisition

Well.. I don't really know how to begin... maybe, er.. an apology to those who emailed me whilst waiting for my blog to be updated. I just got out of clink! There - that's it said...

I have been in jail for a month.

It all started with a drink (doesn't it always!) It was really all David's fault. I thought that my jail-time days were long over after I the stamp-fraud thing at Gibbons, but thanks to me listening to that old fool, I have been languishing amongst the great stinking Spanish unwashed in Alicante nick, eating dago food such as salad, pie-ella and torty-illa. Not a hint of a chipped potato or a good English fry-up in the slightest. No bloody sausage, no eggs fried in best Lincolnshire lard, no black pudding, no pies, no HP sauce or mugs of milky tea.

We had seen a car parked near to the bar as we packed up to go home. It was an old dago car - a Seat or Sofa or Chair or some-such thing. I don't know, do I! Now - to understand the background to what I am going to tell you you need to know that I had to surrender my licence to the magistrates in 1974 when they insisted that I should have known that the new M6 motorway was one-way BEFORE I caused the Mayor of Manchester's limo to end-up buried nose-first in a nearby field...

I digress - so back to the story.

David and I were on our way home when we saw the car. That in itself was normal - after all, there are more cars in Benidorm than people. Come to think of it, there are more bars in Benidorm than people and that has not done anybody any harm... so.. I continue... the car we saw had an open window and the engine was running. There was no-one in the car. David said something like " Ronnie - it's been a while since you drove, hasn't it...?". I retorted something suitable, and after a few minutes of drunken fecking about I suddenly found myself behind the steering wheel.

We were approaching Torrevieja, about two hours later when the Boys in Green got us. To be honest, I didn't even know that we were being followed until the gunshot took out the back screen and David fainted. We both spent the night in the ospedale and, apparently, the car is still stuffed tail-first somewhere in a salt flat. They can't recover it because its just next to a colony of nesting eagrets in some bird-reserve... oh woe is us...

The net result was this - the next morning the Guardia Civil behaved in an unusually civil fashion and provided David with some new trousers. They gave me a razor. They said that it was for me to 'take the fácil way out'. They pointed out that, as it was electric, the only way for me to kill myself effectively would be for me to stick the thing up my back passage and press the on-switch. They laughed rather un-Englishly, I thought. A bit like Ernst Stavro Blofeld out of James Bond, said David later.

And then to Court. For the odd one or two of you that have never before a court in Spain, I need to tell you that the Spanish Inquisition that we have all read about in our Monty Python history books IS FOR REAL!! (note - that is Mon-Tee Pieee-Thon for you Americans who keep mailing me asking for translations of my Englishspeak) I'd like to tell you that all the court dagos wear red capes and prance about in Papist dresses, but - they don't. They wear Italian suits. Apparently they stopped doing the transvestite thing after some person called Jennie Franky died in the 70s and left them all a history.

28 days in gaol. A couple off for good behaviour... that's for me- as the driver. David got 7 days detention, but was let out in 3 because he did some deal or other. My lawyer tried to play the Hilton Defense. I paid him enough to stay in the bloody Paris Hilton for a day or two to do it. It failed. I refused to "meet the local sheriff in private for a quarter of an hour" to discuss my early release...

I will tell you more when I can. At the moment, I am having a little trouble sitting down on my computer chair for more than 10 minutes at a time. I guess the motto of this sad tale is this... if you can't take it up the ass from some big blackie for nearly a month of long, long nights, then don't nick the car belonging to the girlfriend of the son of the local local Police Chief...