You're nicked

Our staff, for pennies more than minimum wage, are the nation's unsung army of social workers. They bear the brunt of daily life as it is lived by the dysfunctional, the weird and the seriously creepy.

Then, after they've negotiated their way past their colleagues in the tea room they get to deal with the hard cases amongst our customers.

To our collection of crack-pots had recently been added a fairly young man who comes in after dark, always wearing a beanie on his head that he styles with a conical peak. He will spend about an hour in the store with a basket over his arm, pausing to chat with the staff and usually asking to be shown to something in a completely different area of the store.

He is always polite and clean. We tend not to mind the customers who are polite and clean. Indeed after a day of dealing with the usual middle class trash - the sort who cannot bear to bring themselves to be civil to anyone conceivably socially and economically inferior - anyone polite and clean comes as a blessed relief.

But he'll want ponds cream for his mum, or condoms but not pack of three because he 'doesn't want to buy that many' or a particular kind of this or that which we happen not to stock. He usually leaves empty handed having abandoned his shopping basket somewhere about the store and having had a good long natter to a few people over the course of the previous hour or so.

He came to be regarded as a bit of a pain but essentially harmless. The general run of customers, this being a fairly small town, are usually spot on in warning us about problem types and nobody had a bad word to say about him.

Then on Thursday night he was spotted on CCTV helping himself to a £35 bottle of champers. Oops. At a couple of minutes before closing time he lifted the bottle and he scampered, with it under his jacket, through the exit as I was bringing down the steel security shutter almost on his heels.

It was a shame the CCTV footage was only reviewed after he'd left.

Friday morning PC Plod turned up to review the evidence. He was exceeding tall. In fact he was almost as tall as he was pompous. He went so far as to dispute the evidence of the footage and left with a request that we call in the next sighting of the light fingered friend who didn't turn up on Friday evening almost to every one's disappointment. He turned up last night though.

We had almost as many staff in the building as customers and with the exception of the two till operators everyone was deployed on Operation Bollinger. This was not a subtle thing. As special Customer Liaison officer my brief was to explain to the bemused that we were on Crime Watch, but there was no reason for alarm. The staff on hands and knees peering through shelving and around corners were only doing their job.

Our target had come in with a taller and equally skinny mate who meandered separately about the store. This tactic of dividing to conquer was only partially successful. Mate got off, presumably with some goods about his person and made good his escape on a train (we're next door to a railway station). Target man was gathered up and taken to the security suite to be baby-sat by a couple of the young lads, for whom this was probably the most exciting thing to happen in their lives since the day their voices broke, pending the arrival of the constabulary.

They did turn up quite promptly and mob handed though PC Pompous was not among them.

Our light fingered friend spent the night in their company and we are not expecting to see him again any time soon. In the familiar parlance he is Known to the Police. Indeed not only the police but the judiciary and wardens of one or more places of post-sentence incarceration. He's not long out after spending three and a half years away. And you don't spend three and a half years away in this country anymore unless you've done something seriously wrong.

And that is probably why one woman customer last night, having worked out what we were all up to and who we were after muttered "be careful; really, be careful" to me as she walked past on her way out.

Progress

Arrived at work as the police van pulled away. No need to wonder what that might be about. Entered the office to find everyone including the Senior Frustrated Novelist and the Bolshie Book Worm flaked out and looking like they couldn't wait to clock out. BBW doesn't normally work Tuesdays and was inclined to tell anyone who would listen as well as everybody else that she'll Never Do Another Tuesday.

I never did get to hear about Sunday (or Monday for that matter) because things had already moved on too far. Shortly after 1pm, about an hour before I arrived, a female was detained attempting to leave the store with alcohol that she hadn't been paid for. The Ferret (I used to be the Ferret but after my sprint through Health and Beauty on Saturday I'm now The Greyhound) and RatFace caught her after she'd been spotted by Ratty behaving rather suspiciously (that is to say taking a bottle of alcohol and putting it in her shoulder bag rather than her shopping trolley).

Duly she was frogmarched by the Bolshie Book Worm up to the security suite. And after her identity and age were established proceedings were put on hold until a responsible adult arrived to hold her hand. That responsible adult was her mother and that poor woman had to sit through having her daughter's bag searched. As well as the alcohol a crack pipe was retrieved. The poor woman collapsed.

While waiting for the mother to turn up the child had been accompanied by The Ferret in whom she'd confided that she's already on remand (awaiting trial) though what for wasn't divulged. Things are not looking good for her in the sense that she's going away. If she's very, very lucky she'll end up in the hands of someone who'll (a) be prepared to take the time and (b) have the resources to draw on so that this child of 14 years of age gets the help she needs to sort herself out before she goes too far down a path that will lead to a grossly premature and very ugly death. If she is so very, very lucky then being locked up will be her salvation. Otherwise she won't make 25 which is about the life expectancy of a very early female homo sapiens sapiens.

We continue the struggle to 'progress' as a species. Mother nature has a glorious capacity to put us, and everything else, back in our box. Crack cocaine as mother nature's solution to uppity overly aspirational hairless hominids?

By the way this isn't someone fitting the stereotype 'scummy gutter brat' but the offspring of a pair of professionals. As her daughter was preparing to be led away in handcuffs the mother was heard to say something along the lines of "but we've given you everything" which just might be part of the problem.

Thief spate update

I was approached late last night by a woman with her children, the eldest of which has just started school. She's a familiar face, a regular customer and in her own way quite decent. I don't know her life story but it hasn't been easy. I first encountered her down our wines and spirits aisle when she was trying to find a particular wine for someone. That section is hard enough at the best of times, and she had no idea what she was looking for.

Moreover, and this was the tough bit, she lacks even the reading skills to distinguish one wine from another. It was written all over her face that it was taking a large dollop of courage to approach me and say what she did, but she got the words "I have a problem with reading" out and since I knew the particular wine she wanted I was able to get her the bottle without any drama.

The little vignette stuck in my mind with her eldest then approaching school age. I know the extent to which the school expects parents to support their child's earliest years when they learn to read. This mother can't do that. Without additional support her child will be left behind and before we know it a generation from now his children will be needing third-party support to make up for the fact that he in turn can't help them.

As you'd expect she lives on one of the two rough estates built to accommodate overflow from larger urban centres and dilute those people who in the States would be called trailer trash across the county.

What she approached me about was theft being perpetrated on an almost industrial scale, against us. High value alcohol, toiletries, baby products, expensive joints of meat. The thieves are running a 'to order' business from the estate including supplying alcohol to under-age drinkers.

She gave me a vague description and an address. This was courageous of her though not quite as noble as it first appeared. She's been aware of their activities for some time but has decided now to inform against them because the night before those people had broken into her flat and taken out anything they could carry, which suggests she's in the process of learning a rather tough lesson.

This will all be passed to the police and we'll do our best to ensure that no suspicion that she's informed will be aroused.

Great Expectations

This post takes us back to something that cropped up a little while ago: the Slob's brilliant plan to take up an allotment plot and make our fortune growing vegetables. I believe I suggested at the time that this plan would fail because he has No Staying Power. Sure enough he hasn't even had the stamina to see through the very necessary step of Taking Up The Allocation.

Pathetic.

Spike in crime figures

I've often thought we'd be dead easy to do over ... but that it would never happen. I've grown rather blase, wandering about with great wodges of other people's cash in my hands. Perhaps I've overestimted the common sense of the people I live and work amongst - after all the entire building is usually* subject to blanket security camera coverage.

This is such a dead-end place it doesn't even merit a pier (though the next town down the coast has one) or a row of those hideous tat 'n' tacky post card stalls. Then yesterday the card and trophy shop over the road from my home was held up by a couple of numb-nuts. The perpetrators were either sad out of towners who thought there might be something worth committing an armed robbery for in this town, or a couple of local yokels who've never been far enough afield (like the nearest town worth the title) to know better. Personally I favour the latter: a couple of opportunistic home-grown pot-heads out to make a quick quid.

An armed robbery less than a couple of hundred metres from my front door isn't funny. There are very, very few advantages to living here; freedom from fear of serious crime was supposed to be one of them.

The Big Swinging Dick's reaction to news of an armed robbery less than a mile away from his own little retail empire was a succinct and expressive "Fucking Hell!". I hope that the Handmaiden was present to soothe the savage little beast's fevered brow.