The Gazette-Advertiser, Exchange and News, January 18, 2013

Page 7, Column 4.

Local boy detained!

By Alistair Kenzie McWhiskie

A 16 year old boy has been detained for taking and driving away a car without the owner’s consent. A silver Renault 18, belonging to Mr. Terrence Hardparcel of 31, Manioc Avenue, disappeared on Tuesday evening and was recovered at 9 p.m, damaged. On detention the teen was found to be carrying over £1,000 in cash, which he allegedly said he had “saved from odd jobs” and with which he offered to pay for repairs.

                Interviewed later by the Gazette, Mr. Hardparcel, a prominent fertilizer producer, reluctantly laughed: “I’m getting used to it.”

 Sergeant Cressida Lamprey, of Tollwood Police Division, courageously captured the miscreant after a chase in which a police car was also damaged and the driver suffered whiplash injuries at the notorious speed bump on the corner of Manioc Avenue and Margaret Thatcher Drive.

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Austin Auchinlosser, more than twenty years a probation officer, ran his hands across his head, staring at the police report six inches under his eyes. His good-will was running as thin as his hair, but he forced himself to look for a bright side. The boy could perfectly well, he reasoned silently and weakly, have unreported income from odd jobs, and offering it to the police officer could have been a perfectly genuine offer of reparation and not the attempted bribe reported by the sergeant. “I must stop using 'perfectly' as a qualifier”, he muttered to himself, “I have a perfectly good English degree”.