A fugitive from Auckland
A relatively lawabiding citizen one day, a recidivist the next. Life’s tough in the provinces.
So much for the slow lane. For the second time in six months, I’ve been caught speeding by the coppers. In my latest affront to good public order, it is alleged that while proceeding in an orderly fashion in an easterly direction on Te Ore Ore Rd, Masterton, I was found by a speed camera to be exceeding the 50km/h limit.
I had, in fact, been proceeding, or so it’s claimed, at a shocking 55km/h.
Back in June, I was nicked for the same thing on the same road, though on that occasion I’d been driving at the even more horrifying speed of 56km/h.
Each of these outrages – which, to my shame, were committed on a road where there’s a school, a hospital and a church – carries a fine of $30.
I can’t complain, I suppose; do the crime, pay the fine. In mitigation, I’d like to point out that my crime spree is at least heading in the right direction: down, albeit at 1km/h per offence.
The mystery to me is how I’ve so quickly become part of the criminal class, the underbelly, the lumpenproletariat of Wairarapa, when for 30 years in Auckland I pootled about the city at about 55km/h with never a fine to show for it. I did so, not because I enjoy going faster or breaking the law, but because, as everyone in the whingeing traffic jam on the Waitemata knows, when the congestion clears enough for you to get out of second gear, you’re more or less required to travel at about 55, lest you hold everyone else up.
But not on Te Ore Ore Rd. This might be because things are slower in the provinces, and this is vigorously enforced, for reasons of form, by the local constabulary. Or it could be that we country folk hold each other to perilously high standards.
Some of the eye-opening crime reported in the local paper certainly suggests the latter. There was the occasion when two individuals took it upon themselves to call the police when a “drunken man” had the audacity to walk up Masterton’s Chapel St at 11.30am. Police, the paper reported, “attended and then escorted the man home”.
The same week, the police were called after a man was seen pushing a wheelbarrow down Church St shortly before 2am. Evidently, a sharp-eyed, presumably insomniac crime-fighter called the coppers because this sort of carry-on was “quite odd” for that time of day. Police surveyed the area, the paper said, but could not find the man “or his wheelbarrow”.
During winter, someone was dobbed in for smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine in town. When the police turned up to sort out this dangerously LA-in-the-80s behaviour, the poor bugger was found to be vaping.
And then there was the day in August when the Queen Elizabeth Park deer sparked an armed call-out. Apparently some idiot had released them by cutting a fence, and the police weren’t taking any chances with the 14-pointer stag.
I’m not saying Masterton
– the country’s reigning most-beautiful city – is a hotbed of misdemeanour crime, but I am inclined to think, given I’m now known to police, that if you can’t beat ’em, you have to join ’em.
I have no plans for mysterious late-night wheelbarrow pushing or to walk the streets in broad daylight while under the influence of strong beer. No, my devious criminal mind has been hard at work on a plan to save me money.
After carefully studying the infringement notices, I’ve noticed a most interesting correlation between my offences: each was committed around the same time on the same day of the week. So my master plan is this: to continue driving in an orderly fashion down Te Ore Ore Rd. Just not on Wednesdays between 10 and 11am.
Someone was dobbed in for smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine … the poor bugger was vaping.