Is that a gun strapped to your leg?

Or are you just pleased to meet me?

As I parked the lorry at the back of my lovely neighbours' cottages, I heard a voice shout:
"Oi! Are you licenced to drive that?"

"Yes, but I'd like to report a crime"

I walked over and leaned in through the open kitchen window of Mellor's cottage to see two members of the police armed response unit, having a cuppa.

"What's the problem darling?" The smiling police girl asked.

"On Sunday, somebody nicked my boots"

"What happened?" She asked sympathetically.

"Well, while I was removing the dog from the outside of a dead chicken she'd found on the lawn, I put my boots on the boot of my car. Then, because I was in a hurry, I must have driven off without retrieving them and someone must have nicked them when they fell onto the road."

"But that will teach them." I continued, "Because they leak. So go and look for someone with wet socks"

"I've seen them"

"What someone with wet socks?"

"No your boots. Are they short blue ones with a different colour sole"

"Yes. Where?"

"Along the lanes, I'm sure, now let me think. Yes, near the pub, at the side of the verge"

While we were loading Neighbour's paintings into the lorry, to take them to the exhibition he is holding - which is why I was parked there in the first place, the police car roared off up the lane.

Five minutes later the police boy was back with my lost boots, very wet and a tad smelly - the boots, not him, you understand.


As the police girl from the armed response unit said, "You couldn't make that up!"

Which is why I took photographic evidence.