MisterMMM.com: Mark's blog

March 7 2011

Friday night after band, we went to the pub and had a social drink. At least it started that way, but some of the guys live right next door to the pub and walk from home after dropping the car off.

I needed to keep in mind that I was driving home so limited myself to one pint. One of the other guys recalled the days before the breathalyser and how you could drive home well over the limit, but it was part of the culture of the day.

Last year I had someone go for test who was actually doing a re-test. He had been caught drink-driving and was over the limit. There's this idea that you can metabolise a unit of alcohol every hour, so he'd limited himself to 1 pint an hour, and had 2 pints over 2 hours.

He got breathalysed outside the pub and was just fractionally over the limit. Consequently lost his licence for a year, had to retake his test, and his insurance was rather higher. He didn't realise that there are 2 units of alcohol in a pint of beer.

Then I remember reading about how one police force started breathalysing people on Monday mornings on the way to work. Just to check whether they had recovered from the weekend's bingeing. They found more than they were expecting were over the limit.

On the ring road around Bridge Street, sometimes the police and DVLA are out checking whether cars have tax. I wonder if they pick up anybody over the limit. I hope I have recovered from that pint on Friday! :-}