• Lorry driver Ashley Hazlewood, questioned by police about an
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excise licence on his vehicle, chewed it up and swallowed it.
I shudder at the thought of what he would have done had he been found driving on bald tyres.
• Those among you who regularly suffer irritating, expensive and seemingly inexplicable delays at Britain's customs points will no doubt be glad to hear that there is a new way round the problem. It is rather a clever concept actually, called a "dwell time".
The idea is simple. All you've got to do is bring a fresh attitude of mind to bear on those weekly waits at the quayside. I am reliably informed that customs officials now talk of "dwell times" as the waiting time you should expect to bear as a matter of course. You will only be delayed for example, if you're marooned on Dover's Eastern Docks for seven hours which exceeds your alloted four-hour "dwell time" by three hours.
To the outsider it is laughable, to the insider it is a recipe for trouble. One man's idea of a "dwell time" is bound to be a truck driver's poison. Still, like most examples of officialese, one can see the tangential logic behind the scheme.
It is the classic way in which Sir Humphrey Appleby would paper over the cracks. You can hear his answer now. "No Minister, loads are not being delayed for 12 hours each at Dover, they are merely exceeding their normal dwell times by a factor of three."
The Hawk would be very interested to compile a list of his readers' dwell times — on a postcard, please.