Giles Brown
IT’S a hard task being an ageing Wild Young Thing.
It’s bad enough that one of heroes that you used to rave to in the 90s passed away recently.
‘Firestarter’ was THE dance floor filler in my London days, although we amended the lyrics.
One of the bunch of Marbella misfits that I partied with in London was from South America, not too far from the Amazon.
We therefore found it hilarious to scream, “He’s a blowpipe darter, twisted blowpipe darter”.
As the saying goes, you had to be there.
One of the good things about being over a certain age, however, is that you don’t tend to attract police attention.
As motorcycle-riding teenagers in 80s Marbella, we were forever being stopped at police road blocks.
Most feared were the Guardia Civil’s.
Remember, this was the old school Guardia, complete with their three cornered hats, fond memories of Franco and casually slung sub-machine guns.
They make the modern force look positively touchy feely.
The odd slap here and there taught me a lesson in life that I still adhere to – namely, ‘Don’t F**k with the Guardia Civil’.
I thought my days of alerting police suspicion were long gone, until I ran into a Policia Nacional roadblock outside Puerto Banus the other week.
After the recent spate of shootings, involving international hit men, I wasn’t expecting to be ordered to pull over in a rather battered, Spanish-plated, Ford Focus.
“Turn off your engine,” the sun-glassed officer instructed.
And then the classic question.
“Do you have any weapons or drugs in the car?”
“You mean apart from the loaded AK47 and five kilos of Bogota Flake?” was the answer that flashed across my mind.
Thankfully, I didn’t try that line, but was still ordered out of the car, had to turn out my pockets and was then patted down, while luxury 4x4s with foreign plates were sailing past unchallenged.
And, of course, some friends saw me being frisked.
Pulling into the petrol station afterwards, I bumped into a glamorous female friend, who said she’d seen me with the ‘hunky policeman’.
“In fact he was gorgeous,” she purred, a mischievous glint in her eye.
“I went round the checkpoint three times, hoping he’d stop me!”
