We’re publishing an original piece today by a first year student at Edinburgh who was recently chased off a beach by Police Scotland for the crime of drinking beer and listening to music at night. This is the kind of thing students across the country have had to put up with over the past 12 months, although the Scottish authorities have been the most heavy-handed. Here’s an extract in which the author describes what happened when the police appeared:
At 9pm, what looked like a white delivery van wound its way down the road towards us with only its orange sidelights on. When the vehicle came to an abrupt halt on the road above us we turned the music off and watched the vehicle intently. A window was rolled down, and a head popped out and barked in a Glaswegian accent: “Run!” The next second, blue lights and spotlight beams were switched on. Officers waving flashlights leapt out of the van and ran towards us.
“Fucking Tories!” we heard one of them shout. “Get one of them! We only need one!”
The party dispersed instantly, most breaking left inland, while I and 10 others foolishly ran towards a pier on the right. Hysterical laughter and drunken waddling ensued as we fled, with some struggling to shoulder boxes of rescued Budweiser. As we reached the pier, a second van screeched up from another direction and several more officers disembarked. The sea was behind us and the police were closing in, executing a pincer movement.
The laughter stopped and all of us began frantically burying booze and speakers in the sand, or concealing belongings under seaweed. We then made a dash inland between what was now a narrowing gap between two van-loads of police.
Click here to find out what happened next.
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