Towy Valley

I have pretty well finished the painting of the Towy Valley above. I will go back to it and have another look in the next few days and add a bit of detail probably?

I was pleased to hear from Colin and learn that Phil and Gill also occasionally drop in on my blog.

There were a few instances over the years when I was professionally embarrassed. Many years ago I was teamed up with a Detective who was something of a character. He was an ex PTI in the Para’s and had a fairly robust outlook on life. A real good guy.

One day we were dealing with a burglary nothing more than someone having their house broken into and their meter emptied. Now these were admittedly a few years back in the days when an offence like that was investigated. A police officer attended, house to house enquiries were made and every effort made to find the rascal wot had dun it! Policing was intelligence led, but the intelligence was the Bobby behind it. Life was so simple then! It was also before the time of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which had a big impact in policing some areas (and passed others by).

Anyway we had a good idea who had done this, as there were only a couple of active burglars in that area at the time. Although we had no other evidence we collected one of our suspects off the street. He was fairly conspicuous with an outrageous haircut and leather jacket I think it would not be unfair to say he was a punk.

We sat him in the CID Office. He parked his jacket on a chair and we discussed things in general, the beginnings of the Universe and where he had been that morning. He was adamant that yes he had done lots of bad things but on this occasion no he hadn’t done it. To be fair he was quite an amiable youth despite being a good customer. (To be honest I got on pretty well with most criminal types, which thinking about it now is pretty worrying).

He told us he could go out and maybe get information and let us know who had done it but it wasn’t him. This went on for a couple of hours. He stuck to his story and I was beginning to think maybe he was on this occasion innocent.

At this point our supervisor came into the office and asked what was going on.

He walked over to the miscreant and picked up the leather jacket looked at us dropped the jacket on the floor with a clang and thud, looked at us again, muttered something about dumb and dumber and walked out. The whole of the contents of the meter were in the leather jacket, which must have weighed quite a few pounds.

 We hadn’t searched him and the whole time the stolen money was just sat there.

The cheerful burglar now happily admitted his work stating he nearly had us.

It’s fair to say we took a bit of flak over that one.