On my way to the Westfield Shopping Centre tonight to carry out some peaceful Christmas shopping (peaceful in comparison to the manic Oxford Street) I noticed that there was quite the police presence at the station. I didn’t really think much of it except that I wanted to stop and play with the cute police dog (who reminded me of a ginger version of a neighbour’s dog called Mugsy – all floppy ears and bounding around with energy) but I wanted to get my shopping done with quickly. On the return journey there was another, even more cuter, police dog – a nice little black lab. My mistake was to make eye contact with the little cutey and make my usual cutesy dog come hither sounds and would you believe he/she sniffed me out and signalled me for a drugs search!

I noticed that the people whose job it was to herd me over to the searcher were a bit intense and, knowing I was not even the remotest bit guilty, I could help but feel like a bit of a crim! The woman who searched me was pretty cool though and made lots of funny jokes about it. Apparently, before me, she’d had the highest success rate of searches (over 50% of people she’d searched had drugs on them!) with everyone else having only 6-7% success rate. Its the first time that I’ve ever seen such a search at my station though the police woman said that they quite often targeted it because they knew that people went to … and she didn’t finish because someone else interrupted her! Darn!