The Elaborate Case of the Nose-Picking Killing Machine

Gerry had just retired when his wife, Hilda, died of a night-time stroke. They’d been married forty-one years.
He’d had four strokes over the past ten years and, pampered by the wife, it was the stress that proved too much for her to bear. That and the terrible nightmares of losing him.
Gerry had become morose and hopeless since Hilda’s death. He was terrible company, and his family weren’t tight enough to help in any way, shape or form.
Once he’d righted himself, all he found time to do of a day was get up, have tea and toast, drive to his wife at the graveyard (where he’d sit on his foldaway chair and read the latest romantic novel to her, as promised), return home for soup and a sandwich, crash out on the sofa with the Express till five, make his supper, settle down for some TV and the remainder of the crossword, and then he’d be off to bed.
One thing that had developed since Hilda’s death was Gerry’s habit of clearing his nasal-passage in short spurts and then rubbing or scratching his nose for an indeterminate time.
This ritual, which took place every five minutes of his waking life, was Gerry’s response to advice from doctors regarding his strokes in the old days. That they’d only suggested for him to do breathing exercises (without the scratching/rubbing), and only twice a day, had somehow slipped his quite compulsive, and very active mind.
One day, Gerry was on his way to his wife when a low-key traffic-jam presented itself.
Sat there with nothing better to do, Gerry began his exercises. The short spurts of inhalation and exhalation through the nose preceded the rubbing/scratching process over and over.
A CCTV camera-operator based in West Sussex, some fifty miles from where Gerry and his Austin Maestro sat, caught sight of him apparently picking his nose, and zoomed in on him to investigate.
The operator was young and ambitious. She was up on all the latest laws and directives for minor motoring offences, and enjoyed ticketing mild traffic offenders.
One new law, which she found particularly amusing, prohibited road-users from nose-picking for more than a total of seven seconds whilst on public highways.
This new law had only come in a few months ago and, being a wary old soul, she’d never applied a ticket for this purpose, perhaps waiting for a sure picker, as was Gerry, so she brought her interest in his plight to the attention of her superior, who watched her superb recording of Gerry picking (or was he scratching?) his nose for a mammoth two minutes and forty-five seconds.
They chuckled together, but decided that the new law would have to be implemented in this case.
Gerry received the ticket a week later and, as a first and in debt to his wife, he decided to fight his corner to the last. He decided that he wasn’t a potential killing-machine, as the offence’s introduction implied.
By asking a neighbour, he enlisted the talents of a bright young law student that needed small bits of money in exchange for representation, and together they mounted his defence with aplomb.
He explained the nature of his habit to the court and was applauded.
The judge ordered that the case be thrown out, calling the new law ‘health and safety gone mad’.
The local newspaper got wind of it, and asked Gerry for an interview but he declined. Limelight was never his bag and, besides, he’d done this for his wife, not a drab, right-wing rag.
The whole thing had perturbed him, though, and before long he developed a twitch on his nose.
His lawyer, still reeling from the decision, noticed the twitch and they both agreed that it had come about as a direct result of the stress caused by the whole court affair, and so he advised Gerry to pursue a lawsuit against the authorities, which he did.
They won the case and Gerry was awarded an undisclosed five-figure sum for his troubles.
The new law was immediately scrapped. It had cost the taxpayer almost £1 million and not a single person had been prosecuted for picking their nose at the wheel.
Two days later, topple-testing for gravestones became law.
As time went by, stakes started springing up around graveyards, propping up the more precariously balanced headstones amongst the daffs and tulips.
Gerry had learnt to carefully dodge the stakes that had been hammered at right angles to the headstones of unvisited souls, but they made getting to Hilda harder, and they didn't fit in with the place. They looked very sinister, very Hammer House of Horror, and he'd seen an old dear have a terrible fall the other week.
His beloved wife’s grave was one of the furthest away from the entrance, which he liked because he couldn’t hear traffic there, but he had to admit that it was a bit of a hike at the best of times.
One day, having just arrived at his wife’s stone, he tripped up on a stake and fell, smacking his temple on the corner of his wife’s pristine headstone as he went.
He lay unconscious, and then woke up an hour later, caked in blood. He couldn’t get up, though, and died in the night, right there next to his beautiful wife.
Due to lack of graveyard space, he was allocated a slot in a graveyard some twenty miles away.
His family would never visit anyway.
His lawyer-friend, as a gesture to Gerry, went on to fight against topple-testing, and a year later, topple-testing was shelved by the government. ‘Halfway measures avail us nothing,’ they’d said.
It had cost the taxpayer some £46 million in its first and only year. It saved no one.