With age comes experience...

You know when, at the time, you laugh about something like a lunatic, but when you recount the story to someone else, they just get all worried and make it sound like it really shouldn't be fun at all? Well, I haven't quite got around to telling John about this yet...for exactly that reason.


So today at work - which promised to be nothing but a dull interlude between watching Danger eat jam-on-toast for breakfast and coming over and cooking up a storm later - I was expecting, well, boredom layered upon boredom layered upon tedium.

But the day dawned crisp and bloody cold, so it seemed a perfect time to go an annoy some drug dealers. Sgt Donovan and I have a very annoying old case on the books (all unsolved cases are annoying). We know roughly who did it. They know we know. Everyone else knows that they did it AND that we know they did it AND that they know we know.



Of course, no one is talking to us, because it's all gangs and drugs and closed mouths and that crap. So we like to go and make their lives miserable with early wake-up calls and generally ruining their trade for a while. (The stench of Pig hangs around, so I'm told.)

We'd just finished having a chat to one of our local, friendly, neighbourhood crack dealers, and were on the way back down the stairs to go and call on the next one - few people around, mostly folk just dragging themselves out of bed in time to go and find another hit - when we literally walked into a couple of blokes in the stairwell.

I've done enough time and shoe leather to recognise trouble, so when the bloke behind went for his belt, I went for mine. Except he had a knife, and I didn't have a baton, just good muscle-memory! (Think the ASP is still in my in-tray. May be in my out-tray. I do know my stab vest is under my desk...) Anyway, happily the bloke in front turned and ran, so his mate did the same, luckily, and then the adrenalin kicks in and I feel like I'm a 19yr old beat copper on my first foot chase. Down stairs three at a time, chucking ourselves around corners, bouncing off the walls, yelling for back up down the radio, Sally instinctively going one way and me the other at the bottom and then proof I can run, if I have to.

Thankfully uniform weren't too far away, and we know the estate as well as those scrotes did, so it didn't take too long to corner and catch the bastards. Especially when the dog unit turned up. An angry Alsatian does wonders in persuading someone it's not worth trying anything on.

Sally and I scarpered before anyone insisted we did the arrests and paperwork, and both laughed like kids on the way home - adrenalin being a wonderful thing. That and the gallon of coffee I drank this morning. And it most certainly put off a good few deals, the number of units who turned up. Both blokes were also wanted for various offences, and failing to appear, so all in all, a good day!

Until the Meeting Of Boredom. Which I maintain I shouldn't have had to sit through. I mean, "So, Lestrade, what views do your department hold on the matter?" "Oh, knife-wielding maniacs? Let 'em all roam the streets, yeah, brilliant. Of course we want them locked up. But where? The Govt. are closing prisons." I think they could've guessed that.

P.S. Poison won the poll by a mile, you bunch of cowardly murderers! Although it does suggest you're all women. (in a very general statistical way - women are much more likely to poison.) Gun and ligature came joint last. I presume it's because guns are noisy, hard to get hold of and hard to get rid of, and most people apparently had to google ligature...