It’s that gadget that almost everyone has in their pocket nowadays. In the US they’re called ‘cell phones’ the Germans call them ‘handies’, and in the UK they’re just referred to as ‘mobiles’, and I expect they have other names in other countries. All those names are perfectly sensible, they do work on a cell system, there’s no doubt they’re handy and, unlike old fashioned phones they’re certainly mobile. But, alas, they don’t work everywhere. In towns and cities there’s no problem, the masts can be hidden with no problem, the big sign on your local filling station probably hides one, but out in the sticks it can be a problem. Not too bad in open countryside, or even where it is fairly hilly, but where you get an area with deep valleys, as in the south-west of England, then covering all those valleys can be very difficult. And that is where we start.

Of course I can’t tell you where this is, for reasons that will become apparent, but this particular village, sitting in it’s deep narrow valley, lacked any coverage whatsoever, and the phone companies weren’t very interested in providing cover because there weren’t enough people to make it worth their while. You see when the government granted licences to these companies they didn’t say ... and you will provide cover for everyone ... no, that would have made the licence fees not worth collecting, and besides, most government ministers, like most of the population, live in towns and cities. Whether the relevant ministers had an eye to a lucrative retirement as a director of one of those companies I couldn’t say.

As in many places this village was a conservation area, which means that would be difficult to find somewhere which was acceptable to the council and residents to put a mast, but, as luck would have it, there was one place in the village which would be well screened by trees but could still provide good coverage. And there the real problem starts, as usual in villages, it involved personalities, and the start of it went back some years.

It often amazes me how long people’s memories can be, but this all began when Dennis McGregor was on his way home from a tryst with a certain lady, with whom I was also acquainted, who was, shall we say, fairly free with her favours. Provided you could afford them of course, which needless to say I couldn’t, but I had gone to school with the lady and often met her in ... social settings. In entertaining Dennis, who she told me was quite generous and well worth the cost of a bottle of gin, she had provided him with several glasses from that bottle. The consequence was that on the way home Dennis was stopped by the police and, since they said his driving was a little erratic, they requested that he blow into their little machine, followed by a ‘request’ to accompany them to the police station to give a blood sample. The upshot was that he was charged with driving whilst over the permitted limit.

Now I happen to know that he was very unhappy about this, and that he told his wife that he had been in the Conservative Club – for non UK citizens that is a club for members of the eponymous political party. Now I happen to know this because Dennis’s wife, a delightful lady to whom he paid insufficient attention in the bedroom and who was accordingly forced to seek solace elsewhere, told me about it a couple of day’s later when we were taking a break during an afternoon’s entertainment. She considered it highly amusing and could barely stop giggling.

Dennis, of course, considered himself one of the ‘county’ set and so he expected that the magistrates would accept whatever story he cooked up, and since he would be defending himself, he had after all studied law, there would be no problem. The story he chose was that he had been attending a birthday party and had enjoyed a couple of helpings of sherry trifle, not realising just how much sherry the lady of the house had put into it and in consequence had not appreciated that he was unfit to drive. Yes really, Dennis was sufficiently arrogant that he expected then to believe this tale, after all, he was a gentleman! Let me tell you if I thought that Dennis’s wife had had a fit of giggles at his previous tale of his whereabouts, this time when she told me I was completely unable to do anything that would stop her.

On the day he had to appear before the magistrates she decided to accompany him, moral support she told him, but of course she didn’t believe for one moment that he would retain his licence, and she knew he would be far to arrogant to park his car in a local car park rather than outside the court where the police would be waiting for him so that they could charge him with driving without a licence when he came to drive home. He had given them a hard time when the booked him and they would be delighted to get even. And let’s face it, she was going to find the whole thing highly amusing, and perhaps her sitting in the court stiffling laughter with her handkerchief didn’t help his case. The magistrates, she told me later, were glaring balefully at her.

But before that Dennis had to undergo a further humiliation. Before going into court he was frisked. He was none to keen on this and made his feelings known in no uncertain terms, in fact he made a big fuss. The court officer who was charged with carrying out this operation took it all in his stride, if Dennis thought for one moment that he could come up with an insult that this worthy had not previously heard he was sadly mistaken.

It turned out that the magistrates had probably heard as many unlikely tales as the one the Dennis spun, and were basically not interested, so he lost his licence for a twelve month and had to pay a substantial fine. When they got outside the court there were several police officers waiting for him, but his wife had taken his keys and held them up and gave them a nice smile. She opened the passenger door and told Dennis to get in, and then she got into the driver’s seat, waving the keys again as she did so.