I broke the law a couple of months ago. I stole some money and I seem to have got away with it. Maybe, now I will have a hobby in retirement I’d never considered before.
Instead of watching the BBC News Channel all day and becoming more and more depressed about Brexit, I will embark on a life of crime instead. I seem to have an innate talent for it.
That day, I had swapped cars with Caroline. I was ferrying older patients to and from the doctors’ surgery - something I do from time to time and I needed her car because it’s bigger and more comfortable for frail passengers than mine.
I had finished my journeys by mid-morning. In the afternoon, I went to Isleham, a village about 70 miles away, near Soham in Cambridgeshire.
I went to see someone who was advertising some Wisden almanacks for sale. It turned out to be a fruitless journey because the books were certainly not in the “Good” or “Very Good” condition that he had advertised.
I reached Isleham by setting my sat-nav to the fastest route but coming home and in no rush, it was set to avoid all motorways and where possible, ‘A’ roads. Somewhere along the route home, I stopped to fill Caroline’s car with petrol. It was an uneventful journey.
That evening, after I had told Caroline of my largely wasted day, she asked if I’d remembered to fill her car with petrol. I told her I had.
“How much was it?” she asked.
“Twenty pounds.”
“But I asked you to fill it right up,” she said.
“I did,” I assured her.
“You can’t have done,” she said. “The tank was less than half full when you started off and so it must have been more than forty pounds, maybe fifty.”
“Well, it was twenty and why do you want to know anyway?”
She explained that she was keeping a record of fuel cost because, as the car was nearly four years old, she was thinking of changing it for an electric one and she wanted to know how much money she could save on fuel.
“Was it exactly twenty pounds?” she probed.
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you think that was a bit odd? A nice round number like that?”
“Why should I? It must happen sometimes.”
Caroline went out to check the fuel tank in her car. When she came back she was mystified.
“It is more or less full but there’s no way you only put twenty pounds of petrol in. It would have been at least thirty pounds to fill it up at the start of the day before you went anywhere. How many miles did you do, morning and afternoon?”
“About a hundred and sixty.”
Caroline was puzzled. I was puzzled.
About a week later, I was still thinking about it occasionally but when I went into a local garage to buy some windscreen wash fluid, I found the answer to the conundrum - I think.
I parked some way from the pumps but as I walked past them to the sales point, I happened to notice the first pump sign and it looked like this:
That is a number 1 but to someone with other things on their mind, or thinking about something, it could register as a 7. I remembered that when I paid the cashier for the petrol in Caroline’s car, all I had said was, “Pump seven,” and he had asked for £20. Perhaps I’d actually been at pump 1.
As it was exactly £20, I’d paid by cash and so I had no record of the name of the petrol station I’d inadvertently defrauded.
How did the customer who really was at pump 7 react when he was told that his bill had already been paid? I wonder how long it took the garage to understand exactly what had occurred.
The following day, I retraced my route as well as I could but despite making the journey twice, there and back, I couldn’t identify or find the place I was looking for.
Until this incident, I’d never fully realised the value of the cross stroke as in the continental way of writing the number seven:
I’m publishing this in the hope that if I am ever tracked down, I’ll be able to use this post as evidence that I really did try to make amends.
For now, though, I seem to have got away with it.
