CONSTABLE ALONG THE TRAIL a perfect feel-good read from one of Britain’s best-loved authors by NICHOLAS RHEA

Author:NICHOLAS RHEA [RHEA, NICHOLAS]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller and cozy mystery suspense
Published: 2021-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

It was the poet Robert Burns who reminded us that the best laid schemes of mice and men often go astray and this was certainly the case in the occasional activities of some residents of Aidensfield and district. For unknown reasons, nothing ever seemed to work out properly for some people. Whether this was due to a lack of careful planning, a too-casual approach to the project in mind or merely bad luck is something we may never know but examples included the man who began to fell a tree in his garden, only to have it fall in a direction exactly opposite to what he intended—and it flattened his greenhouse. Another tree feller managed to destroy a neighbour’s henhouse while a third blocked a busy road with his amateurish forestry work.

There was one man who tried to increase the space inside his house by knocking down the wall between the living room and kitchen—and part of the upper floor collapsed. Cars have run away because their handbrakes were not set properly, chimneys have caught fire because people threw petrol, not paraffin on a stubborn blaze, people have been swept away at sea in rubber dinghies while snoozing and cattle have escaped into village centres or on to busy roads because ramblers have left farm gates open. In previous volumes, I have related accounts of people diverting moorland streams only to find they have re-routed them through someone’s home; I have been told of illicit lovers in cars on the beach who have been caught by the rising tide and there was the pair of naked lovers whose van ran away with them inside to finally crash and set on fire an entire hillside of bracken and young fir trees.

It’s all good fun for the police and other agencies for such incidents can happen anywhere in our wonderful country. Gatherings of police officers, firemen, social workers and others love to relate their personal stories of people who are amazingly daft and careless in their personal behaviour. It is perhaps a good thing that although the rescue agencies and public services spend valuable time and money on some spectacular rescues, they are able to laugh about some of them afterwards even if the episode was somewhat embarrassing for the hapless participants. Police canteens are always a rich source of such tales, and it has been said that police officers spend much of their time working as dustmen, i.e. clearing up the mess caused by the great British public.

The truth is that no one is immune from making silly mistakes; we all do so from time to time but most of us manage to contain our embarrassment within the family circle, like the man who forgot to place his order for milk outside one night and got up very early next morning to do so. The snag was that he was naked and as he stepped outside to position his empty bottle on the doorstep, the door slammed shut due to a strong draught, the Yale latch dropped and he was marooned in the street, completely naked.

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