I fought the law and...

Given the fact that the firm I work for assists the wheels of justice in their deliberate rotations, it may disturb my employers to learn that one among their number is a wanted felon.

After a frankly psychedelic drive home last Thursday - a pitch black fever dream of nose-to-tail jostling and wildly veering red lights that could easily have convinced me I'd been sucked into Tron - I staggered through my front door to find a letter from Sussex Police waiting for me. It is alleged that 'at APPROX. 16:00HRS on 09/10/2009 at [my road], [my car] was involved in a road traffic accident, where the requirements of Section 170 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 were not complied with'. It then goes on to get smugly officious in that peculiarly irritating manner perfected by our fine constabulary, and to add stylistic horror to injury the last couple of paragraphs consist exclusively of upper case letters.

Sussex Police, please note: IN THIS, THE DIGITAL AGE, USING ALL CAPS IN ANY CORRESPONDENCE IS LIKELY TO BE INTERPRETED BY THE RECIPIENT AS SHOUTING, AND IF THERE'S ONE THING THAT'S PRACTICALLY GUARANTEED NOT TO GET THE CITIZENRY ONSIDE, IT'S BEING SHOUTED AT BY YOU.

While I've probably been responsible for several of what I like to call 'nudging incidents' over the years [if you never bump anything they aren't bumpers, duh] , I'm at a loss to recall an occurrence of such gravity that someone would see fit to involve the rozzers. I live in Hanover in Brighton, also known as Muesli Mountain on account of the large numbers of left-leaning Guardian readers living there. It's a warren of inch-wide streets with little in the way of parking restrictions, and accidents invariably happen: I've accidentally broken the headlamp on a yellow VW van before, and some weeks later had a tail light cover of mine smashed in karmic return. The decent thing to do in such circumstances is to sort it out between yourselves - get a quote for the damage and I'll gladly give you a cheque. Apparently this view is not universally shared by my neighbours. Apparently some snidey little net curtain-twitchers think it entirely proper to crouch, seething, by the window sill while you allegedly vandalize their prize automotive possession [which, I hasten to add, I most assuredly didn't], then rat you out to the filth even as you struggle to coax your grumpy two-year-old out of the insistent drizzle, all the time hoping against hope you can summon up some mild diversion to keep him entertained while you make his dinner, and which hopefully, once you've done that, he'll like. Apparently that's entirely appropriate behaviour for the well-educated, neighbourly middle classes in the wildly futuristic year of 2009.

This isn't my first tangle with the Babylon. Two days into a six-month stint in Amiens in northern France, I was snatched from the late-night streets by three plain-clothes thugs in a souped-up Peugeot. Apparently they were after someone with long hair and a leather jacket who was wanted for violent assault; the design I'd painted on the back of my well-worn biker jacket can't have helped much, depicting as it did a two-tone drug capsule flying into an open mouth. Needless to say, I was somewhat concerned for my own well-being - the only thing identifying their profession was a single 'Police' armband they could have made themselves in true Pierre Bleu fashion, and for all I knew I was in for nothing less than a proper shoeing. They drove me to l'hôpital and shone a torch in my face while some bruised, limping mec confirmed that I wasn't the party responsible for his comprehensive drubbing. Then they drove me back to town and ejected me unceremoniously from the car.

That's how they do it in France, sunshine - none of this 'ere-what's-this-all-about-then letters-through-the-post bollocks.