Warming Up

I have lived a long life of crime and always stayed one step ahead of the police. However much I taunt them they can never catch me and I believe they never will. The trick is to never leave behind any evidence of what you’ve done.

On Twitter someone brought up my confession to Peter Lord in the latest RHLSTP that I had shoplifted one of his videos. I regret this crime as it was carried out just for the thrill or maybe as a cry for help. I was a poor student and Boswells the local department store (one of Stewart Lee’s first - and only- proper jokes was “There can’t be a God, because if there was you’d be able to buy one in Boswells” - He didn’t even repeat it 700 times with slightly different intonations. Weird times) had a little carousel of videos which they had foolishly placed right by the door. There were no security tags in place. It was like they WANTED me to steal it. I am not sure I even had any way to play a video in those days (though I am wondering if this crime took place after I left University as my memory is that the first video I owned was Bill and Ted which I bought in London). I think I took Silence of the Lambs at the same time. 

I am not proud of these crimes. They came not out of necessity, even though I was undoubtedly poor, but out of depression. I paid Peter Lord a tenner for the video when he came on the show (he offered it back afterwards, but I insisted he kept it) though to be fair, the shop will have paid for video so he was getting double bubble there. If I ever bump into Jonathan Demme I’ll give him a tenner too. Though it’s unlikely due to him being dead. But he might haunt me as revenge. So let’s say I’ll give Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster a fiver each. Or again. Maybe my money should go to Ian Boswell.

My life of crime began in the desperation of my final term at University. I was a good boy and would never dream of stealing anything. I had once tried to show up the poor security at my sixth form tuck shop by putting a Twix behind my back which I planned to pull out and point out her lack of attention to the dinner lady. Alas another dinner lady was behind me and she remains convinced to this day that I was a thief. But I wasn’t. Not then. My confession of far more serious crimes surely proves that. Also if I was going to steal a chocolate bar then it wouldn’t be a Twix. It’s nobody’s favourite chocolate bar.

I had been a good boy at school, aside from trying to do jokes in lessons and co-creating scurrilous sketch shows and magazines, working hard for my exams. At University I had let things slide, concentrating on comedy and drama and largely failing to get off with girls. I realised as the exams approached that I was in a terrible and unfamiliar position of doing important exams that I was in no way prepared for. I thought I could catch up on three years of work in one term, but of course I couldn’t. One of my English history papers took in the Middle Ages and I hadn’t studied that at school (or university) and I needed MH Keen’s book “England in the Later Middle Ages” to have any chance of catching up (there was no wikipedia then). There were no copies available in any of the libraries and I had no money to buy my own copy (not if I was going to keep myself drunk enough to not have to face up to the mess I was in) and as I held the vital but expensive book in my hands in Blackwells (an amazing book shop with a huge subterranean room so full of books that I still remember the awe I felt as I first entered it as a 12 year old, when I was up in the city visiting my brother)  I made an impetuous decision to make a run for it.

I was, it has to be said, a terrible apprentice thief. I dithered and looked around and then pretty much ran through the door and certainly sprinted up the street and then into one of the college gardens nearby. I was convinced the police were already on my tail and so bent the front cover a bit and wrote my name in the front, as if this would somehow prove that it has always been mine. In a moment of devastating criminal ingenuity I also wrote a date in the book. It was 1989, but I wrote 1988. And so if the police collared me right now and looked in the book they would see my name and a date that PROVED I had owned the book for a year. As long as the police officer didn’t think to dab at the ink with his or her fingers and discover it was still wet.

Always one step ahead.

But then, doubts must have crept in. I can’t be sure about my motivations but I have the book still and I can see that I then crossed out the 1988, trying to blot it away entirely and then wrote 1989 beside it. My guess is that I suddenly worried that I might have an edition of the book that was published this year and that my genius at putting in an earlier year might be my undoing if a clever lawyer was able to prove the book had not even existed a year earlier. I don’t know how I thought I’d get around the fact that I had for some reason changed my mind about the date.

My heart was beating so fast and I was sure that I had just ruined my life, that I’d be sent to prison and sent down from University and be disowned by my family.

But I got away with it. And undoubtedly, in hindsight, enjoyed the thrill of it all. And to be honest the book was absolutely vital in me getting the degree I eventually somehow fluked. MH Keen wrote beautifully about the subject and I was fascinated by the Lollards and the Peasant’s Revolt and the young King Richard II dealing with Wat Tyler. This one book taught me enough to get a passing grade on one of my ten papers. I assume I imagined MH Keen was already dead, but he lived until 2012, so I should have found him and given him a tenner. But instead I’ll recommend his book to you. I read a bit today and it’s great.  But look how expensive it is, even on Kindle. It’s MH Keen’s greed, even in death, that forced me into a life of crime.

Blackwells got wind of me tweeting and tweeted me with a WOW gif. Although a few years ago I had mentioned this incident somewhere (probably in this blog - apologies if so) and they’d invited me to come to the store to be given a bona fide copy of the book for free. I suspected this was a trap like when the police send out emails offering free motor boats to criminals, so declined. They will never catch me.

I feel bad though, even if, in this one case, there was some motivation and justification for the crime. Next time I am in Oxford I might pay Boswells and Blackwells a visit and pay them for what I’ve done. I will also need to go to Boots and Rymans in London as I did go through a period of stealing stuff from them when I was a miserable and poor writer in the early 90s. I was out of control. But never got caught. Probably because I wrote my name and the previous year on everything I took.

I will never apologise for stealing pick n mix though, or recompense the charlatans who sell it. I look forward to the day that they are sent to prison for their crime of price inflation. 

I am mildly horrified by all of this, looking back. Obviously if I’d been caught I would have cried like a baby. The only time that I was close to prosecution was when I attempted to use a week old travel card on the tube, but the ticket inspector saw how shifty I was, caught me and then told me I was in a lot of trouble. He saw me crumple and pitied me and let me off with a stern warning. And I never tried that again.

What a stupid way to behave. Don’t steal stuff.

Unless you really need to. Then make sure your run away really fast and write your name on the stolen thing.

But I am innocent of the Twix theft that still hangs over me to this day in Cheddar.