Dial 999 for trouble

I may have never dialled 999 before in earnest, but I did once dial it.......as a joke. I’m ashamed and my only defence is that I was 14 and that I lived in Gloucester so there wasn’t much else to do during the school holidays - particularly the Easter holidays. They really were rubbish. Not long enough by half.

My friend Andy and I would get the telephone directory and look for names that made us laugh. If you do have the surname “Spock”, and you choose not be ex-directory, don’t complain if children ring you up and ask to speak to Captain Kirk.  And, if any part of your surname contains the four-letter sequence “c-o-c-k”, try to have a sense of humour, and don’t threaten to call the police. That just makes it funnier.

Anyway, Andy had a neighbour opposite who  was always moaning at us for riding our bikes near to his driveway, and he dobbed us in  for having a bonfire. Yes, it did get a little out of control but nobody was hurt and no property was lost.

We thought long and hard about how to get our own back. When we finally decided, we were quite proud.

We called the police and said that we had seen a suspicious man hanging around in the road, and that we had seen him climb over the fence and in to the garden of the man we didn’t like. We gave a detailed description.

The police arrived in under 4 minutes. They looked over in to the garden, and there was an unpleasant-looking man fitting the description! It took him about 20 minutes to convince them that he lived there. Brilliant.