Started the day with one very annoyed sister; she had been in the Seagull, put her bag down on the bar and walked away, went back and it was gone. House keys, car keys, new phone and money in it. I remembered it is an Android phone so gave the "where is my phone" a go, not expecting much joy. First we remotely locked it and put a message on the home screen asking the person who has it to phone me, then we removed her Facebook post complaining about the phone being stolen. Everyone follows everyone local, someone could have seen that, identified her and worked out where to use the house keys or car keys. Next step can we find the actual phone? It only went and flipping worked didn't it! On leaving the Seagull the phone seems to have travelled to Cams Mill and then that morning been on a trip to Fareham, up West Street and back to Down End, where it seems to have been static for the past three hours. Good job it was charged up! She called the police with this info, they suggested going there and looking for it, in case it had just been thrown in someone's garden. Not expecting any joy we went along, with a plan to knock on a few doors. No answer in the house where it appeared to be on the map, but then only at this point did we phone it, in case we could hear it ringing. Someone answered, they had found the bag in the street, and were surprised to find we were right outside their house.
At this point it got odd, a lady came out with the bag wanting Kez to be able to prove it was hers, was sort of satisfied that she could identify it and said "ok you can have it, I don't want it anyway". Then questioned her, how did you come to get it stolen? She explained she'd put it down on the bar and walked away from it. "Ah well if you will put it down then of course someone's going to take it, we all would" so I felt obliged to chip in. Don't be blaming the victim for being robbed, it's only the fault of the thief, and no, we wouldn't all take an unattended handbag would we? This upset the lady, was I accusing her husband of stealing it? He had apparently just found it while out on a walk, and while taking it past the police station not taken it in but taken it home again. Everyone keen for the situation not to kick off any further, so thank you so much for giving the bag back, we must go now and we backed away. The lady went in the house briefly then came back to us, crosser than ever, she doesn't know who this person is (me) but he was accusing her husband of having stolen the bag, and is very rude, and indeed a bastard. I wish we'd been filming this bit it was really odd. The lady did not react to any of the situation in anything like a normal fashion. I don't believe she was the one who stole the bag in the first place (we still have cctv footage from the pub to go through) but something funny was going on.
Keep an eye on your stuff!
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town, Kent. Wed to Clare and father to two, I'm a full-stack web developr, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, other languages ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home-automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, family tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.