New NEIGHBOUR

Mr Dear fails miserably to apprehend a burglar

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It was a cold rainy morning and Mr Dear was staring out of the sitting room window. He does this because a) he thinks it makes him look wistful and sensitive, and b) he knows it annoys me when I’m dusting because he could be lifting up all the useless clutter that we keep on the mantelpiece.

Mantelpiece clutter is definitive proof that the Almighty is male. A female deity would not have caused mantelpiece clutter to come into being, knowing that it is very irritating and gets in the way of the cleaning.

Where were we? Ah, yes. Mr Dear. Window. Staring.

‘There’s a woman next door and she’s behaving very suspiciously,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, suspiciously?’ I said, lifting up a scale model of a Mallard engine (and, yes, why do we keep this on the mantelpiece? Very good question).

‘Well, I mean that what she’s doing looks suspicious.’

‘You are a chump. What is it that she’s doing which looks so suspicious?’

‘She’s been peering into the windows, and she’s twice disappeared round the back.’

‘Perhaps she’s a burglar.’ ‘She doesn’t look like a burglar.’

‘What does a burglar look like?’

‘Not like her.’

‘All right, clever clogs.

What does she look like?’