Oh, the irony. A short time ago, I wrote of how the touts would get round the issue of a lack of physical match tickets next season at Ashburton Grove. Well, the god of tout karma visited me before the match against Villa last weekend when I found myself close to being arrested for touting myself! A fairly regular aspect of my matchday routine is to help out people with match tickets they can’t use (usually if a work matter crops up and they can’t make it). There are no shortage of trusted buyers I know. The recipients of the tickets tend to be the same individuals, and critically, no profit is made at any stage of the transaction. So if one regards ticket touting as something done with the intention of making a profit, then I would not consider myself to be a tout.

Handing over a Clock End ticket to a red member and regular away fan – Griffo – on Saturday, Griffo then gave me the price of the ticket to hand back to its original owner – a mate of mine – when I next saw him. All well and good and everyone’s happy. Except I wasn’t aware that the excahnge was witnessed by a couple of police officers. Asked what I was doing by one of them, I explained I was just giving Griffo a spare my mate had asked me to pass on. I was then told that because money had changed hands for it, this was illegal. I accepted that, yes, technically, I was aware of this law, but I was not making any profit and that I was only helping out my mate and Griffo to ensure the ticket was not wasted. A couple of other friends who were familiar with the idea of this were present and interjected to back up the truth of my words. However, slight problem. Despite the acknowledgement that, okay, you are not doing this to make money, the law is the law and I had committed a criminal act.

At this point, I will mention that the two officers involved, if they were even born when George Graham took charge at Arsenal in 1986, would certainly have still been in nappies when George took charge of his first league game against Manchester United. 1-0 it was, I remember it well. So here we had a pair of wet behind the ears youngsters who, realising the reality of the situation, were not about to be reasonable, admit they had mis-read events, just walk off and accept that no wrongdoing had occurred and that civilised society at large was not under threat.

Then it dawned on me. This was not about ticket touting, this was all about power. It was about the kind of low self-esteem which leads certain individuals to join the police force because they need the uniform and the power it brings to feel good about themselves. And arrests don’t do any harm in this regard. The two officers involved were a girl and a spotty young bespectacled lad. Names I can’t tell you, but on the off chance someone in a position of influence at Barnet Police Station where they are based is reading this and can talk some sense into them, their numbers were SX110 and SX217. The girl was taking the lead. I have a young son not of school age yet who enjoys the ‘Mr Men’ and ‘Little Miss’ stories and TV programmes. This WPC put me in mind of the Little Miss Bossy character with her squeaky voice and ‘no way could I be wrong’ attitude. The pair were soon backed up by a number of other officers in case I followed the desired script.

This would have been getting abusive and aggressive at the incredulity of what was happening, as the ticket was confiscated from Griffo and I was told it would be returned to the box office where it would be available for collection by the actual member who had purchased the ticket (and no way was he going to make it or he’d have been at the match himself). However, I am old enough and ugly enough to realise that reacting with any hint of aggression (which this young girl probably wanted me to) would have led to a trip to the station. So I stuck with being aghast instead of anything more threatening, more than once establishing quite clearly that this youngster was fully aware that there was no profit being made from what was going on and that morally I had done nothing wrong, even if legally, I may technically have broken a pretty daft law which doesn’t allow the re-sale of a ticket at face value.

She distanced herself to use her radio – other officers moved in so that I didn’t just walk away. I gave Griffo my own season ticket as I knew there was a slim possibility I could actually be arrested, so he at least would see the match. The most re-assuring aspect was that I had a couple of other friends there to witness that I was neither abusive nor aggressive, so I couldn’t be done for that. I’m assuming she radioed to get a van to come and pick me up and was told to stop wasting time by one of her superiors when the full facts of the matter came to light. Although I fully realised that I would never be taken to court (the Crown Prosecution Service have better things to do), my afternoon could certainly have been inconvenienced with a ride to the police station near Angel before being released half an hour after the match with no charge. So I just awaited developments before the girl told me that I was not being arrested and that the ticket would be handed into the box office.

At a distance, I followed her and three colleagues to the Marble Hall entrance and awaited their exit. Once they had left, I entered myself, spoke to someone at the box office window there and explained what had happened. Thank God that not everyone in a position of influence has personality defects as sense was seen and on giving the full details of the member who the ticket had been sold to originally, it was returned to me. So I was able to enjoy the feast of football that followed after all. Before the game kicked off, I chanced upon the policewoman again and informed her that all was as it should have been before her interjection. That was a nice moment.

However, the legacy of the incident is more serious. My attitude to the police has got a lot healthier – in terms of my beliefs in certain shared moral values they exist to uphold – as I have matured. I was no angel as a teenager, but I now consider myself to be a pretty good judge of what is and is not acceptable in a society if it is to be a fit one to go about your day to day business in. And it is people like me that it should be fairly easy to keep on board. But such incidents change people, and not only myself. Those who witnessed it and heard about it subsequently have all developed a certain ‘f**k the police’ attitude, knowing me as they do. If someone like me is being pulled up on a technicality of a law that exists to prevent touts doing their business, when there are so many far worse things routinely going on, it hardens those who do choose to stay on the right side of the law – at least morally if not technically – and ultimately makes them less co-operative with the powers that be.

The police are supposed to exist to serve the community with their actions. There shouldn’t be an atmosphere of ‘them and us’ where people of my age and way of doing things is concerned. I would like to know how the community was being served by the power trip I witnessed on April Fool’s Day. At the end of it all, there were three victories. Arsenal won 5-0. I saw the game against the wishes of WPC Little Miss Bossy. And I went to sleep that night thinking, ‘Thank God my life isn’t as f**ked up as some people’s.’