Author: Moobs

Last week, whilst I was off drinking wheat beer and eating sausage in sunny Bremen, someone bought £1, 400 worth of laptop computer. Considerately, he used my credit card account to do so. It so happens that the computer company employs an administrator with gimlet eye and a suspicious nature. She hunted me down via the internet and left me a message informing me of the transaction. I wasn’t there to receive the message as at that precise moment I was stood in front of an equally suspicious Bremen hotelier who was holding my card in her hand and wanting to know why it had been declined.

I assumed that paying for three cheap hotel rooms in a German port had tripped some fraud detection algorithim so when my clerks phoned to say that I had had a message from someone about credit card fraud I assumed I knew what had happened. Once the truth was known it was the weekend and I had to wait until yesterday to contact Miss Marple at the computer company.

Miss M was in top form. She promised me an immediate refund and then, barely able to contain her glee, indicated that the fraudster had been dim enough to give them his name, address, email address and two mobile contact numbers. Now even assuming that some of that information was false, the delivery address was obviously a good lead. I agreed with her that it wasn’t going to take Sherlock Holmes (or even Officer Dibble) to get onto the trail of this genius.

I contacted the credit card company who confirmed the card was cancelled and provided me with a special number for police inquiries so that the officer assigned to what I was already envisaging as “Case of the Century” need not spend 40 minutes in a phone queue listening to “Una Paloma Blanca” played on the pan pipes by a man with a tracheotomy.

Being a good citizen I did not complain when the Police informed me that their telephone service was under-resourced and that I should ankle down to the station and report the crime in person. In fact, to ease their task I wrote all of the information they could need out in a short typed document. Just in case that was not clear enough (or I was not persuading you all that I am sufficienly anal) I made sure that the key information was in bold type.

I handed my document over to the desk officer with a flourish and within seconds we were riding in the back of a panda car, lights flashing, sirens blaring, on our way to the East London lair of our fraudster. Actually that is a lie. He took a look at one side of the paper and handed it straight back to me.

Heroic Police Officer: “I need a statement”

Me: “What kind of statement?”

HPO: “A bank statement to show the money left your account”

Me: “This only happened three days ago and the account is now closed”

HPO: “But I need a statement”

Me: “I do not want to appear rude but may I inquire as to why?”

HPO: “Because you could just be coming in here and saying you had your credit card used. How are we to know?”

Me: “I could see that my reporting a crime might require you to perform some kind of investigation. Isn’t that usual?”

HPO: “Without a statement how are we to know?”

Me: “Wouldn’t the Credit Card Fraud Department phone number be some help? You could call them and they will confirm.”

He looked at me resentfully and clicked at his biro. He then stared at the phone number as if he thought it might ring. Then he looked at me again and said:

“We need a statement”.

So off I went crime unreported. Just between you and me I think now might be an opportune time to get into credit card fraud were you considering it as a career option.

Today London is being lashed by wind and rain. The streets around our temporary home are empty and the only noise is the hissing of cars up and down the Kingston Road. Penny is out riding her horse and trying to avoid thinking about preparing her case for tomorrow. The cat is lying stretched out on the carpet at the top of the staircase sleeping and snoring with a soft whistle. I am nursing a cold and wishing I was by the sea.

Until I went to university I lived by water. From ages three to seven I lived in Gravesend, a town with a viking name in the lower tidal reaches of the Thames. I remember it as a gloomy marshy place in whose embrace, with a startling flash of glamour, Pocohontas had died. For a time it had enjoyed a reputation as good place for Londoners to holiday. It was sufficiently removed from London that the sea had diluted the effluent in the Thames and removed the risk of Cholera. Families paddled in the mudbanks or stood wind-blown on the salt marsh as tall ships moved creaking up and down the great river travelling to and from the outer reaches of the empire. Charles Dickens had a home there and the bleakness of the Kent river coast features repeatedly in his works. It is, for instance,  by Gravesend that he has Pip row Magwitch in the hope of getting him aboard a steamer in Great Expectations.

At age seven I moved to Frinton-on-sea. Frinton is well-known in South East England as an eccentric bastion of middle-class values. It developed from a small village from the turn of the last century and peaked in the 1920s. It was a place for senior civil servants and bankers to retire to. Grand houses and still grander hotels had been built. It was bounded by the railway and to get into the town you had to cross a level crossing with a gate that had to be opened and closed by the station master every time a train passed. Within the gates no public houses were allowed (though there is one now). Instead what flourished was tennis and golf, drinks at the Memorial Club and Sunday School. Frinton has a long esplanade with a greensward running two or so miles in length. A steep slope runs from the greensward to the sea and strung along the slope are lines of carefully-maintained wooden beach huts.

As a child I adored the sea. When school stopped for summer we would dash down the seaweed covered steps onto the shingle and kick through the tidepools at the water’s edge. We would sit and let the green North Sea waves break over our heads and shriek as they lifted us and pushed up the beach. The more adventurous would swim to the rafts chained to the seabed a 100 metres or so from shore and lie on our backs watching the clouds dissipate in a sky so blue it hurt to look at it.

Come July university students would arrive to teach bible stories to us and lead us through town on fancy-dress treasure hunts.

As I grew older I became fonder still of other seasons. The walk along the seawall in the aftermath of a Christmas gale with grey waves breaking hard and throwing spray 10 yards into the air left you breathless and with skin stinging with salt. I loved the early autumn when the dusk gathered earlier and earlier and I would sit with friends in the wooden shelters on Victorian benches and we would let the breaking of the waves dictate the pace of our breathing. There in front of us was a body of water made up of countless molecules all in ceaseless agitation; the whole sea dragged by the moon and yet it could somehow communicate only calm.

Landlocked now and on days like today I miss it terribly.