A marriage break-up led in “an indirect way” to a man driving with excess alcohol because his wife was no longer there to make his evening meal.
Police followed Colin Giddings when they spotted his Range Rover leave the Old Coach House pub car park at 1.30am on August 31.
Tracey Ross, prosecuting, said Giddings turned onto Deeping Way and then into Station Road, nearly clipping a kerb.
Police stopped him and he failed a roadside breath test. A reading at the police station showed 63 microgrammes of alcohol in breath – the legal limit is 35mcgs.
Giddings, a building sub contractor of Peakirk Road, Deeping Gate, was banned from driving for 16 months by magistrates sitting at Grantham on Thursday.
He can cut four months off the ban if he completes a rehabilitation course.
Giddings must also pay a £370 fine, £85 costs and a £37 victim surcharge.
Solicitor Beris Brickles, mitigating, said Giddings had been married for 27 years but within the last 12 months has had to undergo a divorce after his wife sought another partner.
Mr Brickles said Mrs Giddings bought the family home while Giddings took out a loan for a static mobile home. He said the break-up led indirectly to the offence because when you are married and go home, you are fortunate enough to have a wife there having the meal ready.
“Now he is on his own, he has a tendency to go back to the bachelor lifestyle,” he said.
Mr Brickles said Giddings didn’t feel he had the energy to cook himself a meal, went to the pub between 9.30pm and 12.30am, left the premises and went to a kebab house and returned to his vehicle intending to take his meal home.
“Had he been in the marriage he may not have gone out drinking on that occasion,” said Mr Brickles. “He certainly would have had a meal in the evening.”
Mr Brickles said Giddings only lived a mile away and felt fine to drive that night.
The solicitor said Giddings travels as much as 100 miles away from home to do estimates for building foundations, sub contracts for that work and as many as five or six labourers depend on him being able to do that for their livelihoods.
He said any driving ban would not just hit Giddings but those other workers too and asked magistrates to keep the disqualification to the minimum.
Giddings had no previous drink-drive offences.