Today the news broke that the town I live in is in the top 5 most peaceful places to live in the Country. The whole Country is becoming more peaceful and suffering from less violent crime and fewer murders (except Lewisham). I have always known this because I am a fan of our local paper. When I first moved here I loved reading the most dramatic story of the week, "Plant Pot Stolen from Garden Shed." The paper is always changing because they change their staff every 6 weeks (or so it seems) and at the moment there are a few would-be Daily Maily journalists working there. Today's headline, "DRUG DEATH DRIVER FACES PRISON" is about a truck driver who has been convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and was found with a small amount of cannabis in his backpack. In the rest of the paper the worst things to happen were an eleven minute powercut at lunchtime, which meant that customers couldn't pay for their shopping in Morrisons; theft of a caravan, a generator, two solar panels and a quad bike and a victory for the community as the man who thought about opening a sex shop has decided against it. In the letters page there is a cute picture of a dog wearing glasses.
The local police station is open from 12 until 6 every day except Sunday and from this picture I took today of the station, they seem to have plenty of time for gardening.
How idyllic it is to live in such a place but the pressure is huge. If I lived in Lewisham I wouldn't need to confess my crimes. I would be the best behaved person in the town but I don't. I'm not intentionally bad, in fact I don't even know how it happens.
It all started in a Church about a year ago. At the end of the orchestra rehearsal there was a pair of brown leather gloves left. I asked around and no one claimed them and as it was cold I wore them home that night. They were really comfortable gloves and still no one claimed them so I carried on wearing them.
This week I cleaned out my handbag and I found a few things I wasn't expecting. First was a dinner band from school that I put in my pocket after we had used it to play A Tisket A Tasket, as part of a music lesson on playground games.
Then, I found a school pencil. This is not something I would normally feel guilty about. Keeping a school pencil in your handbag, as a music teacher is a good idea. You always need to write things on music and it makes a perfect conductor's baton. This pencil felt different though. It is a comfortable pencil, nice to hold, slightly triangular and it doesn't have the tell tale red end that our school pencils have. I racked my brains, "Where had it come from?" and then I remembered I'd been to another school for a training session on a free internet music resource called Charanga (check it out if you are in Essex - it's great) and at the end there was an evaluation form to complete. I was in a bit of a rush to leave, as my first pupil was due to arrive at my house in 20 minutes and so I must have shoved the pencil in my bag.
The last thing I found came as quite a shock. There were two pairs of leather gloves. The first, sort-of stolen from a Church and the second pair......? Suddenly, I remembered. I had also sort-of stolen these from a different Church. At the end of the school Christmas service I couldn't find the brown leather gloves and it was really cold. I was grumpy (as I often am after playing the piano in public) and I had lost my voice. Despite the fact they had never been my gloves in the first place I secretly and silently
cursed whoever it was who must have walked off with my gloves. Then, as I was leaving, I saw my gloves and rejoiced that someone had found them and put them on the side. I picked them up, pulled them on and walked back to school feeling happy with warm hands. Over the next few months I thought how my gloves had developed into a really nice colour and didn't seem to be quite as brown as they were. "Haven't these gloves weathered well?" I asked the Long Suffering Husband.
He now thinks that I am going to be struck down, "It's one thing to steal something but to steal it from a Church."
Now that I've confessed I'm wondering how I can stop myself being an accidental kleptomaniac and there is an item on the news about how they have stopped bike theft at Newcastle University. By putting up posters of watching eyes, bike theft has dropped to almost nothing. Where there were CCTV cameras bike theft stayed the same and where they had nothing bike theft had increased. So, I was wondering if all Churches and Schools would like to put up posters like these they may be able to stop me letting down the town by being the worst criminal around.
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