» Breakin' The Law

Visit from the SWAT team
3rd year university up in Nottingham, 8 of us lived in a house directly above a Ladbrookes, and opposite a pub. One day we discover several 2ft lengths of plastic tubing in the house, and that frozen peas fit rather snugly in them.

Most evenings were spent stoned and/or pissed, and our idle minds required simple entertainment. After shooting each other, we realised there were more interesting targets, in the form of students, outside... you can guess what happens next.

After a week of pea-shooting the occasional student, and loving every second of their bewilderment, our confidence (read stupidity) grew rapidly. Since we were on a corner we had good cover of the surrounding area, and at the peak of this game we were getting slightly carried away. On this particular occasion 3 of us played the "game" till about 2 in the morning. Then about 2:30 one of our housemates came back.. "There's about five police cars just down the road, something big's about to go off!". 3:30 and we hear a loud banging, and look out to see several policemen trying to break into the Ladbrookes below, obviously trying to get to us. My mate goes down to explain, gets promptly pushed against the wall and searched. The rest of us, in blind panic, attempt to clean up the hundreds of rizla, fagends and remaining gear before 5 armed police come up seconds later.

With a bag of frozen peas and the plastic tubes still lying on the table it was pretty obvious to them what was going on, and thankfully the head of the group had a sense of humour. My mate decided to tell them to "go catch some real criminals!" which sent us, at least, into fits of laughter. It turns out, however, that they had had three 999 calls about our antics and they thought we had been firing air-rifles. The house had been surrounded and a sniper was aimed at our windows, hence they knew about the weed. We were searched, and the house searched for these supposed air-rifles. Meanwhile we were told that our antics were "utter stupidity" and that we should know better. Luckily we managed to keep the weed and amazingly we weren't arrested, the only comeback was later being indirectly humiliated in a scathing article about students in a local paper. We asked for that, though, as we decided for some reason that we could sell the story to a paper, and voluntarily told several of our misendeavours.

We were c**ts back then.
(Thu 8th Jan 2004, 15:20, More)