Breathalysed for my birthday

My latest proud possession is a home breathalyser kit. With Christmas and birthday combined, I’ve had loads of presents over the last few weeks (from shoes through iPhone accessories – yes I have one, “come friendly muggers” – to a new suitcase instantly recognisable on any airport carousel). But a couple have only just turned up.

The first is a jolly Victorian Parian-ware figure of the Muse Ourania (Astronomy), courtesy of Willingham Auctions. (Actually, the catalogue said just “a classical figure”,  but the globe and compasses clearly identifies her, I think.) She is going in my study at home, as soon as I have got some more shelves, and then got books off the floor – so I can actually walk into it again and there’s space for her.

The second is the said home breathalyser.

What prompted this present was this Christmas’s drink-driving campaign, suggesting that a good dinner would very likely leave you still over the limit the next morning. I feel quite confident that I know when not to drive during or after an evening out. But I haven’t got a clue what the score would be the day after.

The good news is that I haven’t yet, after many times of trying, been over the limit at 8.00 am (or at least not according to my kit – assuming it’s accurate). But there are still all kinds of odd discrepancies on the evening before, between me and the husband. Which is to say, after about half an hour into a shared bottle of wine I am regularly twice the legal limit – he is only half way there

Question: am I surreptitiously drinking more of it than him, or is there a gender thing here? We plan some controlled experiments: carefully measured quantities, consumed at fixed intervals, with regular experiments on the breathalyser.

In real life (I mean, with real policemen), I have only ever been breathalysed once. It was about 15 years ago, coming back from the library one Saturday/Sunday morning at 2.00 am, when  I hadn’t had a drop since a small gin and tonic some eight hours earlier. I was got by the cops because of a non-working brake light and asked to breathe into the machine.

It was strange how scary it was, even though I knew there was no risk that I was over the limit.

The irony, on that occasion, was that I had actually been looking for the police a few hours earlier. Alone in the (ground floor) library with another female night-worker, I had been assailed by a group of the local youth who came up to the windows and waved their willies at us for what seemed like ages. Where were the boys in blue when you wanted them? Nowhere to be found. But quick enough to pounce a few hours later, when my brake light was on the blink.

That particular affair didn’t finish till the following Monday, when the then University Security Officer came to visit the scene of the alleged incident. I was not to worry, he assured me -- men were never dangerous when in a pack. Hadn’t he heard of gang bangs?

Maybe I got off lightly just being breathalysed.

Comments

[Lord Truth]

It probably is true that Libraries -certainly years ago, could stoke eroticism.This is surely because the architectural ambience was usually heavily Gothically male contrasting with the lightly clad females-the rule of silence caused the visual senses to be stimulated-the small stepladders used by females produced erotic fantasies relating to feeling or looking up womens skirts-libraries are also one of the few respectable places where males and female strangers may silently observe each other at length and finally one must remember that paper absorbs odors extremely well.Books are read in all sorts of places,bedrooms ,toilets etc where every kind of male and female pheromone is invisibly absorbed and may well have become apparent in days before deodorants etc could mask or diminish their effect

[Richard]

Well, Tony Francis' story seems to show that the library *was* full of sexuality - just none of it was hers!

Readers who worry that their sex drive has grown tired and dull should go to a library and try to read a very long monograph in German. Your mind will turn to thoughts of lust within less than half an hour. Much less, probably.

I've been told that the British Library ranks with the night clubs of Ibiza as a place to "score" - but this has never happened to me. Maybe I was in the wrong reading room. Or reading the wrong books.

[Tony Francis]

Some time ago, a comely lass in the Wichita State Library asked me if I could help her find some books. She had a list of eight books, and did not know how the numbering system worked. I thought this was indeed a come-on. After all, who could be that dumb, but look that good? Soon enough, we had found two of the books. I was charming and witty. She was a giggling vision of true angelic loveliness. By the time we found the third book, I was convinced this classic, heavenly beauty could be the mother of my children. Then she told me she now understood the system. I told her I would be glad to help her find the other five books. She declined any further help, and gave me an unmistakable look that said (without saying) "Get lost, chump." Deflated, I went slinking back to into the shadows. Even Foska couldn't have found much erotic in any of this. Now the Cambridge Professor tells me the library is full of repressed sexuality. If only I could be thirty years younger, I would go to the library and try to tap into this potential. Alas, I am just too old to investigate it, anymore.

[Eileen]

Lord Truth is onto something, but I would say no, we women are not insulted, but fearful. The waver of the small one signals his extreme desperation; whereas, yes it is true, we are amused and admire the boastfulness, the cockiness of the others.

[Lord Truth]

The rule regarding indecent exposure is quite simple.If your penis is exceptionally large it may be exposed anywhere without fear.
Females young or old will either giggle slightly or regard it with the same respectful awe applied to any of the worlds wonders.
If you have only an average or miserably nonedescript organ the female will scream hysterically,call you a dirty pervert and pull the alarm signal-the female will have regarded the smallness of your organ as a personal insult.Such is their hypocracy

[SW Foska]

If libraries are 'hotbeds of repressed passion' might not the reverse be true, and brothels be reappraised as sites of repressed learning, drudgesome outlets for those who secretly hanker after but cannot attain the kinkier aspects of erudition?
Someone went to California recently and told me of a science research institute that had had to build a gym because all the geeks would just fall apart and die, so much time did they spend working and so little doing anything else. Maybe a parlour of sexual diversion would serve them better.

[Mary]

What a wag you are Michael Bulley. You will see from the TLS this week that I did go and seach out Henry Reed's Streets of Pompeii.

[Michael Bulley]

Well, it was late in the evening of March 24 and I was walking home with some friends, who, like me, were classics students, when we saw the lights of the college library were on. That being unusual, we went to investigate, just in case anything untoward was going on. When we got to the window, we saw two women inside with their backs to us. It all looked quite innocent. Then one of them turned round and saw us. It was Mary Beard, one of our classics lecturers, who had been teaching us about Roman festivals that week. I presumed she recognized who we were, but all of a sudden she started shouting. It was difficult to make out the words through the glass, but it sounded like "You're mental cases!" That, though, seemed rather rude. Then Jack, one of my friends, realized what was going on. She wasn't saying that at all: she was speaking in Latin! And she was saying "Io! Mentulam quasses!" - "Hey! Shake your phallus!" But why would she say that, we wondered. Then the penny dropped. The date! It was March 24, the festival of Priapus - as we had learned from her that very week! We looked at each other and Jack said "Well, these Cambridge lecturers are very broad-minded, you know" (we had, after all, been reading some pretty risqué stuff - Catullus, Petronius and so on). So, despite the chill wind, we decided to enter into the spirit of the thing. The next day, Jack and I happened to be crossing the quad in the opposite direction to Mary Beard and another of the lecturers and so we gave her a big smile and a cheery wave, but she just looked a bit puzzled.

[Paulo]

Once, when I was innocently reading in the Oxford Union, a young lady put her feet up on the table opposite me, and yes, she was not wearing nickers. Presumably this was some sort of gesture, and I did not imagine it had anything to to me with me personally, but what was I supposed to do?

Paulo

[Xjy]

THE rape in a library scene just has to be the one in Blackboard Jungle, the Glenn Ford film of the mid-50s, although it has the perp leaping through the glass-windowed door to get in. Nice lot of books for a crappy school in a crappy area, really.

Going to see the film on a weekday afternoon in Lower Hutt with some mates was actually the only occasion I ever wittingly played truant.

I loved the assembly hall seen where the brutalized deputy head just rasped "Shaddap" into the mike to get the students' attention.

Of course libraries are hotbeds of repressed passion - but how else would you define any gathering of human beings? Flushed cheeks, burning eyes, flames licking your loins, surreptitious glances to check out the state of play...

"Back in the classroom
Open your books -
Even the teacher
Dunno how mean she looks...
Working your fingers
Right down to the bone,
And the guy behind you
Won't leave you alone...."

No wonder we all take so easily to drink :-)

[abc]

Yes, and cars are too. They go pretty fast.

[Mary]

Tony Francis's remarks don't ring true with me. I've always thought of libraries as hotbeds of repressed passion.

[Tony Francis]

As a denizen of many libraries, I can say I have never seen a rape, a willie or any other signs remotely resembling carnality in any one of them. Occassionally, a coed could be viewed sitting in a chair in a most un-lady like fashion. I presume it was unwitting posturing on their part. As Seinfeld might say of men waving willies in front of girls: "These are men who have run out of good ideas." There was a stir at the public library in Salina, Kansas when a couple was accused of getting to the main event behind the stacks. The librarians were shocked and appalled. So the story went, they were instructed to stop, which they did. Later they were re-discovered doing the same thing, which only added another layer of shock and appall to the librarians already thin tolerance for such behavior. It was difficult to tell whether they were more angry about the act, or the blatant disregard of the order to stop.
In a obliquely related matter, the term denizen had a distinctly different meaning at English Common Law than it does today:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denization

[abc]

if a girl were raped in a library, then it would probably take a very quick reflex for her to put a knife in a potential attacker's back and then the fun stops. The defence might be automatism, depending on the traumatic side effects at the time

[Eileen]

maybe the police should be patrolling the inside of libraries: all kinds of wicked things happen in the stacks and under the tables!

[abc]

I guess English bobbies should patrol loads of places, or may be not. Apart from the liver damage, mary, it's bingo, I think, and well done to Rome.

[Xjy]

In Yugoslavia, the rule is basically that if you're only as drunk as the cops, you're OK. I remember some stopping a thoroughly drenched group of us once, and their only interest was to see if the boot contained guns. You have to be really smashed to do time (as my friend's boyfriend has had to). The guns are a real problem, even in tranquil Vojvodina. The same friend's son (16) shot a school bully dead with one of his. His favourite, as he once proudly showed me, was his Czech-made automatic carbine.

[xjy]

Ah, Yugoslaaavia, Yugoslaaaaviaaaa!

Driving along after dark, everyone (3 locals plus me) three sheets in the wind (as the web taught me the phrase should go), the police drove past and asked us to stop. We were in Vojvodina not far from Novi Sad and had just left a main road. Not a word about booze, but they wanted to look in the boot. They weren't interested in drink, only weapons.

The basic rule there seems to be that if you're only as pissed as the cops, you're OK.

(Although Vojvodina has only been the object of NATO aggression - the very mixed locals get on fine most of the time - guns are still a big problem. My friend's son - 16 - shot a school bully to death with one of his guns. His favourite, as he proudly demonstrated to me once, was a Czech automatic carbine.)

[Tony Francis]

When I was in medical school, the rule of thumb was: an ounce of alcohol could be metabolized every hour. This roughly equates to a glass of wine or a beer. There is an interesting graph showing metabolism after various number of drinks. Most US states have a driving limit of 0.8 mg %, which is the first line below 10 on the graph. After 4 drinks, it takes 6 hours to get to the legal US limit:
http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/alerts/l/blnaa35.htm
There are a lot of stories about drinking with eating, having fat accumulation, etc. The California Bar had an interesting take on it: They advised telling the cop you wanted to call a lawyer, and sit in the back of the cruiser and hyperventilate. I doubt this works, but they said it might. Also, people claim they are diabetics and in a coma. Remember, no matter what you blow on your home breathalyzer, the cops and the judge are going to believe their reading and not yours. If you refuse a breathalyzer, it is taken as presumpitve evidence of intoxication. If you've had 2 or 3 drinks, probably ought to wait about 4 -6 hours before driving. Heavy drinkers and alcoholics will wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning and take a couple more hits. These are the ones who will blow positive in the morning.

[anthony alcock]

I can't imagine why English bobbies should be patrolling the grounds of libraries belonging to universities, but it seems reasonable that they should patrol thoroughfares.

[Tom Benford]

Yes, it is gender. There was a report some years'ago, if I remember correctly it was all down to metabolism and relative body mass. And no, almost none of us will be caught'the morning after'; the only cases I have ever seen reported were accompanied by pictures of what were clearly alcoholics. And my own scot free experience seems to confirm that.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

I remember a teacher of mine remarking that Perry Miller, the renowned Harvard historian of Puritanism, could hold more Scotch than anyone he ever knew. As Dr. Preller says, capacities do vary.

[dr venables preller]

Absorbtion of alcohol into the bloodstream and subsequent metabolic breakdown are dependent on so many factors as to make generalisation misleading. Whether the gut is empty or the rate of absorbtion is slowed from a fatty meal will affect the speed with which alcohol hits. Different body weights, habituation and general metabolism including health of the liver can ensure that an amount of alcohol that might make little apparent difference to one person can cause fast intoxication in another.

The concentration of alcohol is also a factor, and the cautious will prefer dilution with water, and remember that fizziness can speed absorbtion.

In theory, commonsense could enable a fine balance to be maintained by sipping sufficiently slowly for alcohol absorbed to be matched by alcohol metabolised and/or excreted in the urine , thus maintaining a state of controlled sobriety or marginal intoxication over a long period.

[kathz]

I love some of the comments the police make. For instance, if you encounter a flasher (as I did, aged 18, in a closed train carriage) the response is, "You shouldn't have worried because flashers never attack women." Presumably the correct procedure is not to concentrate hard on your book and pretend you haven't noticed, but to ask, "Excuse me, but have you got your willy out so that you can rape me, or are you just a flasher?"

Incidentally, a friend of mine recommends the following line in response to flashers: "That looks like a penis, only smaller."

[PhilosopherP]

The way I understand it, women process alcohol more quickly, although I don't know why.... assuming you and your spouse are about the same weight -- if you are smaller, then the same amount will make you blow higher much more quickly.