Nicola Barker - Burley Cross Postbox Theft

35 And not without occasional resistance — especially on icy winter mornings!

36 Shoshana’s family have a tradition of naming their dogs after biblical characters.

37 Samson actually turns eight this year — he was a rescue dog and three years old when we got him. But before Samson I regularly walked Shoshana’s beloved Highland terrier, Hezekiah (or ‘Zeke’), although we were not resident full-time in Burley Cross at that stage.

38 Like an innocent young rabbit cruelly disembowelled by a savage fox (and this is an entirely pointless killing: the cruel fox is not hungry; it does not pause to eat the rabbit — it has already killed and consumed the mother — so attacks the young one purely for ‘sport’).

39 Pathetic creature. Hugely overweight. And I’m pretty convinced that it’s always the same dog she walks; it seems to be lame in one of its back legs, although I’ve never had the chance to meet it — and so identify it — in daylight.

40 No judgement whatsoever is involved in my use of this word.

41 Although one really has to wonder at her facility to locate these random faeces in order to bag them up when it’s apparently so difficult for her to avoid stepping in them in the first place!

42 I’m guessing that this is because the habit took a while to become properly established and then suddenly snowballed after the first few months.

43 The contents are, therefore, always fully visible.

44 Chops, perhaps, or liver/kidney/tongue and other smaller cuts.

45 To be purchased at any large supermarket or pet shop.

46 Quite belligerently.

47 Her word.

48 God only knows what she had in those damn bags — they weighed a tonne!

49 Lucky for TP we were only fifty or so yards from her front door at this stage.

50 And quite incorrectly, it later transpired.

51 I had yet to come across this valuable little booklet and so was, as you can imagine, somewhat confused and nonplussed by this attack.

52 We get the Sunday Express at The Retreat, but only for the sudoku.

53 Shoshana, I must confess, is an avid Corrie fan.

54 The last film I saw was The Full Monty, and I only went to that because my late wife convinced me it was all about El Alamein.

55 Although, as I’ve already emphasized, there wasn’t a problem before TP arrived on the scene — TP is the problem!

56 I won’t bore you with the details here as I am sure Mr Horsmith will already have bored you with them himself.

57 His words, not mine. Shoshana once observed — very wittily — that Mr Horsmith makes Alice in Wonderland’s Dormouse seem hyperactive!

58 By a flurry of phone calls, emails and at least half a dozen letters to the local press (two of which mentioned him by name).

59 Three of her bags were recently discovered in Lowsley Edge — over seven miles away as the crow flies!

60 His letter was full of the most appalling grammatical errors.

61 This struck me as an astonishingly irresponsible thing to say given the deranged nature of the character we are dealing with here. As I said to Horsmith myself (on one of the rare occasions he actually made a visit to the village), by encouraging TP to think that she’s got moral right on her side he’s only sharpening a stick for her to beat him (and the rest of us) up with.

62 Ye gads!

63 A point I made myself to Mr Horsmith — but to no avail — over six long months before!

64 I will return to this important detail a little later!

65 A fiddly process at the best of times!

66 Let alone manufacture fashionable clay jewellery in such prodigious quantities!

67 I.e. yours truly!

68 Which it never was, quite frankly.

69 This is intended as a purely rhetorical question — although, on further consideration, I suppose the person who might possibly be expected to make that vital judgement could very well turn out to be you, Linda.

70 There was a large convention of Girl Guides from Manchester and Leeds travelling to the moor for an orienteering weekend. Shoshana couldn’t bear the idea of these lovely creatures being exposed to TP’s vile ‘handiwork’.

71 Which could barely contain the sheer volume involved — amounting to almost 3,000 grams. If you have some difficulty imagining this weight in real terms, then it would be comparable to around twelve pats of best butter.

72 I have sent another letter to your colleague — Giles Monson — on this subject, along with directions from our lawyer.

73 Shoshana an angry 70 per cent, me, a more reasoned 59 per cent (a broad, general majority, in other words).

74 Uncharacteristically hot-headed behaviour on my part.

75 Quite spontaneously. This was in no way premeditated.

76 But of course you do!

77 As the Yanks are wont to say.

78 Once again, I emphasize that absolutely no judgement is implied by my use of these words.

79 This figure was reached by estimating that, on average, each of TP’s four dogs would be expected to defecate 1.5 times on any given day (an extremely conservative estimate, in actual fact).

80 Her word, obviously.

81 Which I just happened to have with me.

82 Not much of a recycler, then, our TP?!

83 TP is currently in the midst of having some major renovation work done to the external walls of her bungalow. If the rumours I hear about town are correct, she is trying to sue the former owners, Louise and Timothy Hamm, for some unspecified kind of ‘negligence’ — even though Timothy, an ex-GP and a truly inspirational human being, is in the final stages of Parkinson’s and now lives in full-time residential care.

84 So to speak.

85 Probably thinking I was an animal-rights activist intent on releasing them from their hellish penury.

86 I’d been there for almost an hour!

87 I didn’t miss it, which was most fortuitous as it was an especially good episode. One of the contestants came up with the high-scoring word ‘toxocara’, a term that refers to a type of roundworm which is responsible for generating the dangerous infection/disease called toxocariasis. This disease is produced when the toxocara roundworm’s eggs are left to fester in the excrement of a dog for a period of two/three weeks after the faeces have been deposited. I was absolutely stunned when this word came up, and honestly believe it was some kind of message from ‘The Beyond’!

88 Although Shoshana will insist on calling it my ‘episcopy’, the silly moo!

89 Many of the more modest properties in this village — built within a particular time frame — were constructed out of a special, aluminium-based concrete which, while it poses only limited health risks to the residents, can, in certain instances, make it extremely difficult to raise a mortgage.

90 With TP — I hate to have to say it, but say it I must — representing the steaming turd of festering excrement within.

91 Remember that — in my own defence — I was still in somewhat of a state after Shoshana’s tragic fall.

92 For fear of attracting the unwanted attentions of TP’s neighbours, one of whom, a Mrs Janine Loose, has grown extraordinarily jumpy and paranoid of late, since a canny gang of local schoolchildren appropriated the disused greenhouse at the bottom of her garden and secretly cultivated marijuana plants in it. Their illegal activities were only brought to light after Mrs Loose discovered two boys spreadeagled on her lawn, ‘completely monged’, when she went to hang out her washing one blustery autumn afternoon.

93 Who started — but never completed — a child psychology correspondence course a few years back (then swapped to aromatherapy).

94 Apparently — according to Ms Sissy Logan, an old Bluebell dancing girl turned colonic irrigation practitioner — Carl Gustav Jung has written quite extensively on this peculiar subject.