Bull Protettore is the hero of Seeking Angel by A J Burton which has seven 5 star reviews at Amazon.com
This is one of A J Burton's memories - the policeman's perspective.
New Year's Eve changed for me after I became a policeman.
As a young guy I did all the things you do in the wildness of youth: drank too much, smoked too much, fell over and woke up saying. "What a night! If only I could remember what happened? Sure by asking friends I could build up a foggy account of what may have happened but was it fact or fiction? I couldn't say.
For ten years as a policeman I could expect any New Years Eve leave to be cancelled. Single policemen were sent to the traditionally wild holiday resorts while we married men filled the breaches at home.
I often saw funny things and laughed watching drunks making total asses of themselves and recalling my own mis-spent youth. However holidays were also times when people died and were maimed in car accidents, fights, and drunken domestic squabbles. For ten years as a police officer I was totally sober and working hard. I never got to celebrate the New Year coming in.
I remember the drunkest man I ever saw still standing one New Year's Eve. The sergeant ordered me to carry out a sobriety test as Mr Jones was drunk in charge of a motor vehicle. I did my best to test the fellow, I made him try to walk a straight line in the constable's room at the police station. I should have used another room as the man lurched to one side and his head crashed into one of the square cubbyholes where we kept our files.
How his head managed to enter this cubbyhole with the accuracy of a sniper's bullet was amazing. What was even more astounding was that once his head was in the cubbyhole I could not get it out, despite pulling on his shoulders.
The drunk screamed out. "I have gone blind, help me!"
The sergeant came in to check all was well and saw Mr Jones bent at the hips with his head in the cubbyhole. Standing behind him pulling on his body I appeared to be performing some sort of unnatural act upon him.
"I can't get him out." I explained.
Together we managed to drag his head out at great cost to Mr Jones. The sergeant maintained his head had fitted into the cubbyhole so it should be safe to yank it out.
My drunk fellow then proceeded to vomit on the floor, slipped in it and fell face first into the mess. Now if I had written a comedy script about the incident it could not have been funnier and Mr Jones provided my New Year's Eve comedy for free.
After those years on the police I seemed to lose the zest for celebrating New Years Eve somehow. Was it because I became a cynic and regarded the whole celebration as a pain in the ass? Probably.
This year for the first time in many years, all my four sons are in the country at the same time and this will be the happiest New Year's Eve of all.
Birthdays, Christmas, New Years Eve are they worth more than daily celebrating the biggest gift of all?
To me the simple daily act of living life is truly the greatest celebration of all!
Bull Protettore is the hero of Seeking Angel which has seven 5 star reviews at Amazon.com
