Leaving a game at Twickenham not long after the G20 protests last year,
we were subjected to the usual herding along the fenced in pavements toward the town centre. One rebel thought that he'd walk along the road until he was ordered to make his way on to the pavement with the rest of the scum. However, as he was hopping the barrier one of the coppers grabbed him halfway across and tried to drag him back onto the road possibly severely injuring his nuts. Clearly the officer forgot to perform a risk assessment before acting.
Anyway, seeing this my mate pipes up (a naval term you'll know if you've just been watching countdown) "Leave it out! it's not the G20 you know", a mild mannered joke we thought as we chuckled away. But no, apparently it was a far more serious offence and prompted a mounted sergeant major type to trot over summoning us like a pair of schoolboys and threatening to lock us up if we didn't come. Fair to say we took the bait and spent the next 5 minutes explaining that it was our democratic right to make sarky comments and that we were actually causing less of a disturbance than he was. We did have to concede that having had a couple of beers we would be over the drink drive limit, although sergeant big nob didn't pursue this line of prosecution when we questioned its relevance to walking along the pavement.
After a while he was seen to be tiring and two of his subordinates had to come over to help. One of them threatened me with arrest for obstruction until he too was intellectually over powered by my pointing out the clear two feet of space in front of me and asking how much space he needed to get past. Eventually the mounted officer (or his horse) got bored and wandered off, the other two having absolutely no idea what we were supposed to have done wrong either sheepishly found something else to do.
My pal and I were left to congratulate each other all the way to the pub. Drunken idiots: 1, Filth: nil.
(GesticularDancer is sorry if my jokes been done better before, Thu 17 Jun 2010, 16:39, Reply)