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It Now!
Most run-of-the-mill policing duties require an instant or speedy response - it’s just the nature of the job. If things happen, they need either dealing with, or investigating, there and then - that’s how it is and that’s what the public expect. OK, so when dealing with, or investigating something, not everything can be achieved at once, so a “pecking order” soon materialises and officers working together find a pattern in which they are most comfortable, both with tasks and with each other. Police partnerships are the stock-in-trade of American TV shows, from “Starsky and Hutch” via “Cagney and Lacey” through to “NYPD Blue.” Such partnerships practically form the basis of these programmes, together with all the attendant grief and strife that affects one partner if the other is injured, suspended, ill, etc. In the UK, partnerships were not such a big deal, mainly because the British Police Service never worked that way, officers preferring to stand alone as they were trained to do, yet be able to work within a team. The variety of the job always struck me as exciting in its own right, but there were also a variety of partners, as it was rare to work with the same colleague for more than a tour of duty (then, seven days). As a patrol driver, I rarely had the same crewmember for more than one week at a time - John one week, Mick the next, then Derek. This didn’t stop officers having their preferences, of course. I knew that when working with John I would never have to rush to get out of the car to deal with anything - however slowly I disembarked, I always seemed to become the officer in the case. When working with Mick, the speed with which he left the vehicle depended on who the alleged offender (or victim) was. I soon got used to these traits and learned - as many others had done, before me and since - how to get an even break. With Derek, however, no such problems existed. He was an all-round good egg, who was so laid back that nothing phased him at all, but he was also quite happy (even insistent) to deal with his share of the load. He didn’t particularly like or enjoy driving, so he was happy to take an extra job or two from me to compensate for being so expertly chauffeured around. In working with Derek, I became slowly but surely more laid back myself, learning to weigh things up from a range of different perspectives, whilst still - hopefully - making decisions swiftly when required. However, on one memorable night, this trait was to bite us quite hard. It had become progressively colder during our tour of night duty. Monday had been nippy, but clear, whereas there was an infinitely colder wind on Tuesday. By Thursday, it was freezing cold and it was in these conditions that Derek and I answered a call to a motorcyclist who had “lost it” after a fairly simple bend, coming to an abrupt halt against an unforgiving farm gatepost. Although he had sustained broken bones, he was going to be OK and was carted off into the night inside a warm Ambulance, leaving us to deal with the detritus. The track his motorcycle had taken prior to parking in the gate was clearly visible on the dry road, so whilst Derek protected me from any traffic, I outlined the skid marks with yellow wax marker, making sure that I included any debris and other significant marks. By the time we had completed the initial marking and made sure that there was no livestock likely to escape via the demolished gate, it was well past midnight. Not only that, but we were both very cold indeed. Derek took the lead, saying "Right, let's get back to the Station and have an early refs, we can finish this off later." To be honest, I didn't need much encouraging, as it was perishing cold and the road was such that the light amount of traffic we expected to use it in the next hour or so would not damage any of the markings. I turned the Patrol Car around and set off for the Police Station. I’m sure that you know how it feels when you go into the warm, having been very cold - ears glowing and that “pins and needles” tingle as your feet thaw out. We took our sandwiches up to the Rest Room and found, to our delight, that some kind soul had already made us a large pot of tea. In those days, television was totally absent after midnight and there wasn’t much choice of radio either, so we had become avid darts players during our refreshment breaks. Once we had eaten and properly warmed through, we had a game or two, then returned down the stairs to resume patrol and finish off dealing with the motorcycle incident. We looked in disbelief at the couple of inches (50mm) of snow that had silently fallen and now covered the back yard. Although we hoped that it was just a local precipitation, we knew what our earlier decision now meant. Returning (carefully) to the approximate scene, we took it in turns to wield a large broom to uncover the yellow marks in order to take essential measurements for the accident report. It only took us an hour and a half to get what we needed, at which juncture a motorist stopped and said "Just the job, saves me ringing your Station - there's an artic stuck trying to get up the hill and it's blocking the road." Sure enough, there at the bottom of a steep hill, which ends in a very sharp hairpin bend, was a maximum length articulated lorry. The driver had tried to get up the hill, but due to the road layout, he couldn’t get a run at it and because the trailer was empty there was not enough weight over the driven axle to provide traction to overcome the snow. We discovered that a gritter was on its way, but coming from the same direction as the lorry, so it would not be able to get past in order to have any effect. With an air of “serves us right” resignation, we removed two shovels from the GP Car’s boot and began clearing snow. The lorry driver, in the general spirit of co-operation that was shown to Police, remained firmly in his heated cab, drinking steaming coffee from an ample flask. We had already arranged for any lighter traffic to be diverted, but all heavy traffic had no alternative but to wait. The alternative that the queuing drivers chose was to (rather unimaginatively, I thought) also adopt the “wait in cab” method, occasionally shouting “encouragement” from a distance. Three hours later we watched the lorries disappear over the hill in the tracks that we had cleared. It was amazing to me how hot my upper body was, yet how cold my feet were. Needless to say, neither of us ever left yellow marks on a road again, without having first measured up and completed a sketch plan. |
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Wet and Wild Rye Harbour, East Sussex, is one of those places that – unless you live there – you would not necessarily know existed. Accessed by a dead-end road, it contained (in order of arrival) a very smelly refinery that extracted paint from solvents, a few cottages, a garage, a few more cottages, a pub, a shop, a caravan site, another pub, a wildlife sanctuary entrance and a very muddy “harbour” that was really an estuary of sorts that led to the fishing port of Rye itself. It was not a location that warranted or attracted a high number of patrol car visits, but on one particular day became particularly memorable. The first item of note was a white saloon car, precariously perched at the top of the river bank, nose-down into the tidal section of water, just East of the lock at the River Rother. The driver had previously reported what can most graciously be described as a “lack of attention” which resulted in his failing to fully negotiate the sharp left-hand bend just prior to the bridge over the lock. His car jammed on the top of the bank but – as this was in the early hours of the morning – he decided to leave calling out a garage until daylight, in an effort to reduce the fee. What he failed to account for was that his vehicle was on the tidal side of the lock gates and that the tide was coming in. He left his sidelights on as a warning to other motorists, then walked the rest of the way home. Over the intervening period, the tide continued to rise, covering the vehicle up to the bottom of its windscreen. It was after the tide had turned that we arrived, to see a rather mournful and dejected motorist, wishing that he hadn’t been such a tight-wad. He told us that Rye Harbour Garage had agreed to attend, so we continued on our patrol down to the Harbour. As we passed the garage, we saw a mechanic climbing into the breakdown recovery truck. A short and uneventful tour of the “facilities” showed that Rye Harbour was all in order and we retraced our journey, just in time to see the breakdown truck begin to haul the car out of its damp and temporary parking place. We stopped to give assistance in traffic direction (and out of morbid interest too!). As the car was pulled out, the battery terminals cleared the water and the sidelights came on. Although this was just what any budding physicist would have told you would happen, it seemed to delight the motorist beyond all reason. "Oh, great!" he exclaimed, "It's all right after all." The recovery to terra firma alongside the road was now complete and the car parked out of the way and out of danger. It was a sorry site – but then, so would you be if the tide had come in and deposited a quantity of Rye estuary mud all over you. Opening the door resulted in a fairly good rush of salt muddy water, laced with the sorts of in-car detritus that we have all accumulated at one time or another. The driver then pulled the bonnet release and we all peered into the resultant gape - I’m still not sure whether he was expecting to have caught any fish, or not. Everything was grubby, but appeared otherwise fairly normal. I felt it was my public duty at that point to recommend to the motorist that he have the vehicle towed and put to rights by a garage of his choosing, as there were a number of parts, especially brakes, that would definitely benefit from having slippery mud removed from within. "Surely that won't be necessary, will it?" he questioned, "it looks perfectly fine to me. The lights even work! Once it's dried out, I'll drive it home." I then decided to point out that there was no such thing as a watertight car engine - if there were it would not run - and because no engine is watertight, this means that water from the outside will get in if the engine is submerged (as had been the case here). There are several “holes,” including the crankcase breather, the dipstick hole and - of course - the carburettor, which would certainly not have had any King Canute properties. Brushing all of my advice and knowledge aside, he switched off the lights and prepared to fire up his engine. Yet again, I tried to dissuade him, but he was on a roll. Having replaced the spark plugs and dried out the ignition system, he climbed in and inserted the key. His fervour had obviously prevented him from realising a simple rule of physics - you simply cannot compress water. In turning the engine over, enormous pressures were built up inside the crankcase and an enormous bang followed, as one of the pistons decided that its connecting rod ought to get some fresh air. A very expensive and disastrous turn of a key, followed by more towing – and not a “told you so” to be heard! Later in the same shift we were re-called to the Rye Harbour Road, this time by the lock-keeper. The tide was, by now, slowly coming in again and a member of the public had informed the lock-keeper of a problem, which he had immediately passed onto us. We were taken a short distance along the northern bank of the tidal section, where only then could we see a black cat, whimpering and shivering on the lower lock gate cross spar. How it had got there no-one could imagine. What was obvious was that it couldn’t get back, as although the spar was about a foot square (300mm square in modern parlance), it was covered with the aforementioned Rye Harbour mud, which appeared to be particularly slick and skiddy. "I know that this is really a Fire Brigade job," said the kindly lock-keeper, "but they're already out and I don't know when they'll be back - tide's coming in, you know." Indeed it was and because of the cat’s position on the lowest spar (the one nearest the slowly-rising water), there didn’t appear to be much time for deliberation. Our request for a ladder was gleefully responded to by the lock-keeper, who swiftly returned with the longest single piece of ladder that I have ever seen. It must have been nearly twenty feet (6 metres) long and made of very sturdy timber. With a lot of grunting and heaving, we managed to get the ladder into a position close to the cat, with the bottom end, although disappearing into the rising water, on what felt like (and was hoped to be) a fairly firm base. Having made all preparation, I looked round to find that my crew member had suddenly discovered some rather urgent paperwork that needed completing in his notebook, leaving yours truly to descend the ladder! In those days, Police tunics had a belt, which was to prove a definite advantage. As I got closer to the cat, which was a rather unattractive mud-brown colour by now, it became agitated and began hissing and generally making a “don’t come anywhere near me” racket. In spite of my previous comments about how un-visited Rye Harbour generally was, I was quite surprised to see that a fairly large crowd had somehow materialised on the far bank. In case you’re thinking “So what?” allow me to point out that this removed, in the interest of public relations, one possible alternative of removing the cat from its perch! With a rather precarious leaning-over motion, I managed to grab the cat by the scruff of its neck and - by wedging my knee into a rung - get both hands on it. There was nowhere else to put it, so I unceremoniously shoved it down the front of my tunic, getting a close whiff of estuary mud in the process. Thus newly-burdened, I began making my way back up the ladder. The cat, disenchanted with its temporary habitat, poked its head out of the v-neck at the top of my tunic and - as soon as it saw the concrete platform of the lock - heaved itself out of its resting place, digging its back claws into my chest in order to do so. This was bad enough, but there really was no need for it to relieve itself at the same time, that just added insult to injury! It ran off immediately, in the direction of the laundry, from where, it transpired, it had come. A short round of applause, large sucking noises as we extracted the ladder and the offer of a cuppa from the lock-keeper completed the adventure, until, that is, the lock-keeper stood downwind of me. At that point he claimed to have remembered that he had run out of tea bags, so - with all windows open - I was driven back to the Station for a hose down and change of clothing. I hope that the crime rate at Rye Harbour was at its usual low the following day, because I didn’t go anywhere near it! |
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Dedication In 1981, when I was working as a Training Sergeant at Ashford Police Training Centre, we dealt with officers from thirteen Police Forces and Constabularies, so the range of interest and experience amongst the students was vast. Some were more naturally able than others to cope with the mass of rote learning that was then required and those that struggled really struggled to cope with the weekly examinations. One of these poor strugglers was PC Menzies, from Essex, a likeable, gangly teenager, who was so keen you could almost taste it. He didn’t want to just know something, he wanted to understand it from every possible angle (and from a few hitherto undiscovered ones as well). However, he found study really difficult and had to work considerably harder at it than most.He lived in Winchester Hall, one of the male accommodation blocks, set out mainly in dormitories for four Constables, with a separate communal ablutions facility. I also lived on the same landing in Winchester Hall, albeit in my own room, so I was the one who enforced the 11pm “lights out” policy that existed at the time. I began to hear mutterings from PC Menzies’ room-mates that he was keeping them awake with his bedside light, studying into the wee, small hours. Naturally, I had a quiet word with the officer, pointing out that he needed also to consider the welfare and requirements of his room-mates. Horrified that he had upset his colleagues, he promised that it would not happen again. On the following Tuesday, one of his “roomys” came to me and said "You really ought to look in on us after lights out, Sergeant. I think that you won't have seen anything like it." He would not be drawn further, so at around 11.20pm that evening, having made sure that all else was in order, I very quietly opened the door of the relevant dormitory. Once my eyes had become accustomed to the light leaking in from the dimly-lit corridor, it was easy to see what has caused the stir. It was, as you might surmise – PC Menzies still studying, but in a completely light-tight world of his own. What he had done was to acquire a large cardboard box that previously had held a television set of foreign manufacture. Having made sure, by a brief test at home over the weekend, that it would suit his purpose, PC Menzies then cut out his own body shape from one of the long sides – at least, the body shape of the part of him that stuck out of the bedclothes when he was sitting up in bed. He then lined the edges of the cut-out with some soft foam rubber and painted the inside matt black. These refinements were solely intended as light-emission reducing factors, in order not to disturb the other occupants of the room after “lights out.” Finally, a visit to his local fishing tackle shop resulted in the acquisition of a battery-operated bait-digger’s lamp, worn like a miner, via an elasticated head-band. The resultant ensemble was large enough to accommodate the top half of PC Menzies with his knees drawn up. He then propped his Student Lesson Notes manual against his knees and lit the pages with his bait-digging lamp. Not one candle’s worth of light escaped, once he had carefully adjusted the bedclothes to plug any stray light. Totally in a world of his own, he read on into the night, confident that his room-mates could now sleep the sleep of the undisturbed. Now that’s dedication! He put up a very respectable score in all subsequent weekly exams and in the Intermediate and final exams and didn’t know that I knew about his device until his final day at the Centre. Some years later, I met him purely by chance. We recognised each other immediately and set off for a swift coffee together before going our separate ways. I asked him how he had fared over the intervening years and he told me that he was now a rural officer and loving every minute of it. Pleased for him, I asked if there was anything in particular that he had learned from this posting. "Oh, yes," he replied, "the strangest things can make you deaf." Intrigued, I asked what he meant, so he told me about the time when he had been asked to look into a possible disappearance, involving the elderly lady who lived in an old mansion on the hill, a "peacocks on the lawns" setting. The locals had not seen her for a day or two, neither had her gardener, yet he usually received tea and cake when he was working there. PC Menzies had a good look around the detached property, easily accessible as it was surrounded by lawns and square in shape. Every ground-floor window was closed and locked, all upper floor windows held no promise of ladder-assisted access either. Approaching the main living area windows, he cupped his hands around his face to prevent reflections in the early morning sunlight and peered in. Just within sight through the hallway door, he saw one of the resident dogs, laying very still on its side with tongue hanging out. There seemed to be a fair state of disarray in the room, but no signs of break-in or burglary. Checking a similar window on the other side of the house, he saw the other dog, also on its side although facing away from him. Total silence reigned. "There was nothing for it" PC Menzies went on, "I was going to have to sort this out and it was now obvious that I would have to risk waking her ladyship." He approached the main entrance – an imposing structure made up of a large Gothic-style porch with columns approaching the thickness of a good-sized tree, covering an equally imposing church-style arched door, with huge metal hinges about half a metre long and a massive door lock and handle assembly opposite. "That's when I made my mistake!" he said. Obviously, I had to know what the mistake was. "I rang the door bell" he replied "and the whole house blew up." It transpired that the poor resident had decided to end it all and had chosen British Gas to assist in her endeavour. This was probably achieved a couple of days previously, after shutting all the windows. It accounted for both the pets as well, the disarray no doubt caused by their racing about, trying to find fresh air. When PC Menzies rang the door bell, it must have arced, causing the smallest of sparks, but sufficient to ignite the house-full of gas now present. The massive door stayed in place and saved him from injury (apart from being deaf for a couple of hours), although the resulting explosion and rush of air from within knocked the gardener off the ride-on lawn-mower and turned the two-storey ten-roomed mansion into a single-floor one-room shell. Nowadays, PC Menzies concluded, I always knock!" |
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The Art of Communication Picture the scene – just after midnight on an autumn evening in Rye Police Station, twenty-five years ago. The car crew had popped in for a swift brew, taken with the Station Constable and the shift Sergeant, in the Front Office. Talk is of gardening, shopping, crochet work - the normal male PC conversation, as you would expect. The “Key and Lamps” telephone link from Operations Room suddenly sounds (actually, it just sounded, like anything else, either it sounds or it doesn’t, there’s no “suddenly” about it, merely a fluke of timing, but it sounded more dramatic!). The laconic Station Officer, one Constable Ray Brooker, with hardly a pause between sips of tea, announces that there is a "fire at Camber, children involved."NOW there was a “suddenly” – everyone flung tea mugs to the counter and abandoned the office for their vehicles – myself and PC Derek Baker into the patrol car (Hillman Avenger, wow!), with our Sergeant, Ray Duplock, putting on the Morris Minor van as outer clothing. I shot out of the back yard, turned left and set off at maximum speed for the wilds of Camber. Whilst tearing along the A259 Rye to Ashford road I realised that I hadn’t got the address, so I asked Derek if he had it. "No," he replied, "I thought you'd got it." A swift back-to-back radio communication with our supervisor, enquiring as to whether he had the address, resulted in the classic response "No, you've got it, haven't you?" The detective in me then arose – never mind, I thought, we’ll see the smoke or flames! We carried on, agreeing that Sergeant Duplock would take the loop around to the main car park, whilst we would carry on along the main road, eyes very peeled. Towards the end of normal habitation, I spied a man in a telephone box. As we had been receiving some hoax calls in the recent past, I heaved to and Derek got out to investigate the possibility that this was another hoax call. I then shot off, heading east, as I thought I ought to check the “holiday accommodations” just outside of Camber. These, in reality, were nothing more that railway carriages or caravans, dumped in fields on the other side of the road to the sea wall (such as it was). Sure enough, as I approached some of the more remote of these luxury dwellings, I saw a woman in the middle of the road, dressed in night clothes and waving. Whilst it might have been animal magnetism, I suspected that she was really attracted to the flashing blue light atop my firm’s car. I slid to a halt, informing the others that I had “found the job,” then, noting the pungent smell of recent burning, asked the woman "Where are your children?" "They're in the caravan," she replied, for this was a truly luxurious apartment, consisting of a railway carriage with adjoining caravan - an "L" shaped desirable residence, if ever I saw one. I had a quick look round the side and saw four small heads silhouetted against the glow from the oil lamp. "How many children do you have?" I asked, as calmly as I could. "Four" came the reply, "plus my eldest son." At that point, almost as if on cue, a youth appeared from behind the adjoining shed (this holiday home was really the ultimate in luxury!), carrying a large but empty bucket. "Oh, hello, officer," he said, "It's all under control now." I then felt the need to ask the management question: "What is all under control?" "The fire," he replied, "it was my fault, I backed the car into the garage" (well, OK, but it was a shed really). I then had to ask how the occurrence was related, to which he said "The engine must have been very hot and there was some underlay at the back of the garage - I suppose the heat set light to it." Astute persons will, at this point - spot a possible flaw in this statement - but fear not, dear reader, for this was the time of the venerated Singer Chamois - actually the Hillman Imp with chrome bits and an inflated price tag. Their aluminium engines were at the rear and very low-slung, similar to a VW Beetle, but with an even lower exhaust. The young tyro, returned from the night-lights of Brenzett, reversed the car into the garage (shed), then noticed the building started to smoulder when he was attending the outside chemical toilet (no lock on the door, but no reported cases of theft of contents either). He had done his valiant and foolish best, driven the car out and doused the fire with washing-up water, ditch water and any other water that he could find. By this time, the other troops had arrived and we stood for a while to ponder the lucky escape - pictures forming in our minds of exploding cars, blazing outbuildings and Michael Buerk re-living the whole thing on TV (except that the "999" programme was twenty years off). As I stood at a three-quarter profile to the shed (well, OK, garage), something still didn't look right. I couldn't work it out for a bit, then it suddenly clicked - the building was longer outside than it was inside, by about three feet (sorry, for my younger readers, almost a metre). "What's in the back?" I asked, to both mother and elder son. "Oh," she replied, "we keep our young goats in there. That's why I was so worried." The lesson to be learned (in Rye at least) from this true story was that when someone reports a fire that involves "kids," make sure that they mean young members of the species homo sapiens and not the offspring of a goat. Hey ho - those were the days - driving like a lunatic on two wheels and a door handle, to rescue some goats in a shed. As if that wasn't enough, the man in the telephone box was not making any sort of hoax call, but had sneaked out to telephone his girlfriend. Establishing that fact caused him some embarrassment and his wife to reach for the rolling pin. |
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Character Recognition Nowadays, “character recognition” usually refers to computer programmes that can recognise text via a scanner, then turn it into an editable file for you. In the “good old days,” character recognition was much simpler, merely involving the recognition that a particular officer was a “character.” I’ve worked with many such officers in my time, but one of the most memorable I’ll call “Dave” – mainly because that was his name – and for some considerable time he was the Station Officer at Rye. The post meant dealing with communications, both personal radio and County-wide VHF, looking after prisoners and dealing with enquiries from visiting members of the public.Dave had many spare-time enterprises, not the least of which was the manufacture of grommets for tunnel segments. Many tunnels are made from what look like curved paving slabs, each with tongue and groove edges and a central hole. A large bolt passed through the hole into a curved metal “forming ring.” The segments were interlocked and bolted to the forming rings, then a slurry of liquid cement was pumped between the tunnel segments and the hole into which they had been built, thus firming the whole thing up permanently. The grommets were needed to prevent the slurry from leaking out around the bolts, otherwise all that would happen would be the building of a large solid concrete cylinder! In order to make the grommets, you had to cut a specific length of hemp string, then wind it round and round two or three fingers, finally passing the free end through the centre enough times for the grommet to retain its circular shape, allowing it to fit around the bolt like a flexible washer. Dave had constructed an ingenious machine which was affixed to his garage wall. It looked like a hexagonal table top, but had eight long pieces of dowel sticking out of it. It worked by tying the free end of a very large ball of hemp to one dowel, then rotating the whole jig around its central pivot so that the string was wound around all of the pins. Once enough hemp was loaded onto the apparatus, Dave would then cut through the whole band of string, producing copious quantities of exact lengths of hemp string, ready for the manufacturing process. This generally took place during the mornings when Dave was working a 2pm to 10pm shift. He would sit in front of the TV and produce grommets by the score. After a while, you could do it without thinking, but hemp is a rather “hairy” product that sheds a lot of fibres when handled. The other factor was that Dave would only reckon on getting dressed once upon getting out of bed, so usually performed his grommet-making activities in uniform. Regularly coming in to work looking like the bottom half of the Yeti (or looking like “Chewbacca”), he could see no problem with this, because, as he put it, the public only saw him from the waist up! Another of his enterprises was woodworking, which he tended to involve himself in whilst on nights, providing that it was quiet. During the winter months in those pre-Pontins, low-tourism, trouble-free times, such a condition was frequently met at Rye, so quite a bit of woodwork could be done, once the Sergeant had gone out, or – even better – gone home. One night, returning to the Station for a midnight beverage, I glanced to my left as I passed the Station door in the patrol car, expecting to see Dave through the glass – at least, to see the top of his head as he sat within the glazed Front Office/Communications Room. In fact, I couldn’t even see the inner door, as there appeared to be a white mist filling the Station. Pulling up in the Station yard, I looked up at the Front Office rear windows – exactly the same thing, just as though the whole building had condensed, or filled with fog. Entering the rear door, we soon discovered the cause – Dave had brought in his power sander and was smoothing down a large quantity of small wheelbarrow-like plant pot holders, filling the entire ground floor level with fine sawdust. The following night, I again glanced left and was this time able to see Dave and the rest of the normal view into the front part of the Station. Entering the rear door this time brought with it a different hazard – it was difficult to breathe at all. Dave was varnishing his wheelbarrows with something so toxic it was like falling into a vat of nail polish. As a less stressful sideline, Dave decided to keep a couple of sheep to keep his grass down and eventually fill his larder, so he acquired two of the Romney Marsh breed. He had to have an annual visit from the mobile sheep-dipping truck and had to certify – on the appropriate Ministry form – that his sheep had been dipped according to the regulations. There’s no doubt that they had indeed been dipped, but where it enquired on the form for the name of the sheep involved, that meant "Yew Teg" or "Romney" - not "Gert" and "Daisy" as Dave always wrote. Mind you, he never once had a form returned for correction. They never did fill his larder, by the way – he couldn't bring himself to do it. What a character! |
©Ray Girling, 2022-2026