SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME
When a taxi’s not available the temptation to saddle up and ride home from the pub can be overwhelming, but a four-legged lift when inebriated is always inadvisable
Guy Grieve considers drink driving home from the pub
Last winter at a party in a remote corner of Mull I found myself grilling a former policeman on the perennial topic of how it would be possible to drink heavily and still get home in a legal fashion. In a region where there is little or no public transport this is a recurring problem. He confirmed there was no way of doing it and wasn’t offering many suggestions. ‘How about by horse?’ I asked. He thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘As far as I know that’s okay Guy – the rules only apply to mechanical transport, so I think you’d get away with it.’
But would I get away with it, I wondered later as I drove home, boringly sober after one miniscule glass of wine. There were a few major flaws in the idea. Firstly it would take me hours to get to the party, and I would arrive tired, muddy, almost certainly soaked and smelling of horses. The latter is not a problem as horses smell better than any aftershave. In fact the scent of horse and leather might be just the thing for a man to smell of in these soft-handed times.
However, the problem would be the return journey. It would be dark, of course, unless it was mid-summer; and riding whilst drunk would be no joke – although I’m sure through history it’s been done successfully countless
times. The big problem would be if I fell off. My horse is 17.5 hands high and tough enough to mount sober. I’d probably fail abysmally and she’d abandon me by the roadside, returning home with stirrups flying as I freeze to death in a ditch. The slight plus with this scenario is that a rather homely local legend might spring from it. Echoes of headless horsemen and the long-gone days of highwaymen would clothe my end rather nicely.
In the remote snow-bound middle Yukon, I knew a remarkable old Athabascan dog musher who used to travel by dog team to party in the very wild village of Nulato. After imbibing lethal quantities of home brew, and sometimes shooters of pure alcohol made by freezing the water out of whisky to leave just the fire, friends would tie him onto his sled and drag his team around to point back up the river towards home. They’d then lift the snow anchor and shout ‘Home! Home!’ and the dogs would run the twenty miles back to his cabin. By the time they got there he’d have sobered up enough to sort out the tangle of dog harnesses, put the dogs away and get himself inside.
Here on Mull, by all accounts a generation or two ago drunk driving was almost a local pastime, and there are many tales to that effect. As they rarely caused serious harm, they were the subject of humour – like the story of one local character who was driving home blind drunk over a lonely stretch of road when he realised he was being followed by the police. He hastily pulled into a passing place, leapt out of the car and sprinted into the woods, proceeding to live out there for two days and nights before he felt he could come back safely to civilisation. Needless to say the police had long since given up pursuing him – with no way of proving that he’d been over the limit he was never charged.
But on a serious note, the truth is that neither Scotland nor Mull are trackless wilder- ness, and times have changed. With this in mind, in my view the new stricter drink driving laws are a good idea, and I am grateful that our two sons – the older of whom will soon be of legal driving age – will be taking to the road in a culture which is heavily socialised against drinking whilst driving.
Almost every rural community will have a sad story to tell about lives lost due to drunkenness on the road, and there are bends and corners on our roads here on Mull on which posies of faded and dying flowers serve to remind us that it’s not asking a lot to refrain from drinking alcohol whilst visiting… unless, of course, you want to go home by horse, in which case the risk is all yours. Contrary to Guy’s advice, the 1872 Licensing Act states that a person can be fined or face a prison sentence of up to 51 weeks if caught drunk in charge of a horse, cattle or steam engine. In 2009, Newcastle man Godfrey Blacklin was fined £185 for riding his large cob, Bart, on a public highway while intoxicated. Basically, being drunk in charge of any form of transport on a public road is an offence – in 2009 a man was fined for being drunk in charge of a mobility scooter, and on Hogmanay 2015 officers arrested a Dundee man for being drunk in charge of a £10 space hopper on the city’s dual carriageway Marketgait underpass.
‘ Horses smell much better than any aftershave. In fact the scent of a horse and leather might be just the thing for a man to smell of in these soft-handed times’