The ornery nature of some people

[Mr Gus]

Sadly joe, in this age role reversal of camera phones can be damning.

I had 3 on me as part of the effwits next door whilst on the needless probation for the crime I never committed as part of the intimidation which was an attempt to get me locked up after the court case, they were on a roll.

This was another property invasion by their 25 odd stone nephew whilst gambling addict divorced dad & divorced mum (for likely gambling debt reasons relating to liquidity) filmed from their side of the low fence wanting me to "touch" him (assault) or wig out proving I should be locked away.

You have to be the perfect presentation of calm (or snatch their phone away & drop it in the North sea) type thing, angrily turning & venting on their doorstep plays out badly in a court room with a complete ass-hat of a judge.

Anger, don't let it turn you into them.


Damn I'm angry as I write this.

[smegal]

Kinda "cat bin lady" feel to all this.

A very apt description! She is fairly well known for being a nuisance like this, nothing better to do with her time, I think. Be interesting to see what she makes of her photo pinned up on the fence, with the words "Do you know this person" above it. like a wanted posted. My wife's not happy, though, she reckons we should just let thing lie and not stir them up any further.

I've reported it to our local rural policing officer, who's going to pop in to have a look and give us some advice. I have a reasonably good CCTV system already, and an alarm that covers the house and outbuildings, but we can't have any bright outside lights as we're in a "Dark Skies" area. Not sure the police can really do anything if it's just someone being a bit eccentric, but it has shaken my wife up. She's just watched the video and what's shaken her is that it was deliberate. the person had no reason to walk down our lane, walked past our drive, clearly looking to see if anyone was about, before backtracking to rip the sign off, and, we've just found, kicking the top stones off a part of our new wall.

I'd be asking the rural officer to have a friendly word (in a marked car) to discourage further incidents.

Also unnoficially showing the video to organisations that receive complaints can only help. They won't tell you who's complained, but it'll focus their mind when you show the petty acts.

[Oldgreybeard]

The chap building the stone wall is pretty upset at having his work kicked over, not only were some stones kicked off the top, but the mortar has cracked on some lower down, so he's wasted half a day taking part of the wall down, cleaning up the stone and rebuilding it. Infuriating for him as well as us, as he takes a lot of pride in his work (justifiably so, it's why we asked him to build our wall - we'd seen other walling he'd done around the village).

The local community policing team now have all they need, plus I copied everything to the Parish Council (helps that I used to be a councillor, years ago, so still know everyone). The video quality isn't good enough for a positive ID, apparently, so I've dug out one of my spare trail cams that we use around the garden and set it up to take high quality stills of the area of interest.

I'm pretty sure this woman was wholly unaware of the CCTV (hard to miss it though, as we have all the mandatory warning signs up). May be just knowing she is being caught on video will be enough to get her to pack all this nonsense in.

[Joeboy]

I hope it all just fades away. Best result.

[knighty]

if you need more light in your no-light areas... you can get infrared flood lights... can;t be seen by the eye but they'll light up the area nicely for your cameras


as above I'd contact the police and avoid her like hell.... you've no idea what she'll accuse you of if you speak to her

[Oldgreybeard]

I hope it all just fades away. Best result.

if you need more light in your no-light areas... you can get infrared flood lights... can;t be seen by the eye but they'll light up the area nicely for your cameras

as above I'd contact the police and avoid her like hell.... you've no idea what she'll accuse you of if you speak to her

I agree, her just moving on to someone else would be the best outcome, last thing I want is any sort of confrontation.

Good idea about the IR lights. We have a few IR floodlights, use them to light up the garden so we can see the hedgehogs - makes them look as if they are wandering around on a floodlit football pitch (except our grass is more "left to nature"). I'm tempted to shift one down to the end of the drive to try and get rid of the dark area that's out of range for the IR lights built in to the camera, or I might have a spare somewhere, I seem to remember buying one or two extras. Need to sort out getting power down there, shouldn't be hard, though, as the IR lights I bought all run from 12V DC, and I have a hefty 12V supply in the garage to run the garage CCTV, the switch and the long range wireless link I have from there to get a wifi connection to the house.

[Oldgreybeard]

Another twist to this tale. We've had no problems at all over the past few weeks, but earlier this afternoon our nearest neighbour popped in to tell us that someone had stolen all three windscreen wiper blades from his 15 year old Suzuki 4x4. Whoever stole them did so last night, and they live too far away for our CCTV to have caught anything (I did check, just in case). They've lived in the house for over 70 years (he was born there) and this is the first time they've ever had anything like this happen.

The blades had zero value, as they were a couple of years old and not worth the bother of stealing; he reckons he'd have needed to fit new ones for the MOT anyway. Looks very much as if it's the same sort of petty vandalism we suffered from when the wall was being built. I've just been around there and set up a spare wildlife camera I had, probably shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but if nothing else it might reassure them. They are pretty shaken up by it, as whoever did it had to walk up their drive, to within a few feet of their back door.

Seems really odd for there to be another crime here, especially as whoever did it must have been on foot, and they must have dodged the bit of lane that is covered by our CCTV. The person that damaged our wall knows we have CCTV and that they were caught on video, which makes me suspect they deliberately came along from the opposite direction, not past our place.

[Joeboy]

Very odd indeed. Nowt as queer as Folk.

[Fintray]

The person who did that should be rewarded by six licks of a birch in front of the village hall.

[Oldgreybeard]

Very odd indeed. Nowt as queer as Folk.

Indeed it is odd.

The community support police officer has been around and recorded the crime now. She's not said anything specifically, but did mention that there has been a spate of similar odd minor incidents over the past few weeks. As well as setting a trail cam up at their place, to record anyone that comes up their drive, I've also stuck another one up outside our place, looking along the lane. I've made sure both are pretty well hidden, in the hope that we may be able to positively identify the person involved. We both have a pretty good idea who it is, but can't prove it. If it's who we think it is then it's almost certainly a mental health issue, rather than a criminal one.

Lots of fingerprints on our neighbours car, where the person fiddled around to unhook the wipers from the arms, although the police officer didn't bother to recover them - not a serious enough crime to warrant the resources needed, apparently. The two of us have just fitted new wipers to the car and it was far from easy to get them to clip into the hooks, and they are even harder to get off, as a fiddly little catch needs to be released to get them to slide out. What was clear was that care was taken to remove the wipers, makes the whole thing even more of a puzzle. If I wanted to steal wiper blades I think I'd just break or cut the wiper arms off, undoubtedly easier than trying to unclip the things carefully.

The person who did that should be rewarded by six licks of a birch in front of the village hall.

We do still have the old stocks in the village. Someone restored them a few years ago, and they get used from time to time for fund raising events.