Shoplifting, chefs and shames.....

The Beard, as you may have guessed, is a big lover of food... by all definitions of the phrase.... so it was no surprise to find the entire family Beard and selected friends at the amazingly good value Wing Wah all you can eat buffet in Burton on Trent, home of Beer, the other night... the occasion, of course, was the coming-of-driving age of Beard Junior... who, as soon as his licence arrives, will be spreading terror on the roads in the time honoured manner.... but I digress...

Mankind has always had a close association with food, not least because we would die without it... unless the breathairians are correct... which I doubt... and so it was no surprise to anyone, least of all the Beard, who was far too young to be surprised, that almost as soon as books and radio and television began, we have made celebrities out of cooks... indeed, cooks became well known and famous before anyone else but kings, nobles, soldiers, priests and bandits... so suck on that actors and sportspeople... and even today the celebrity chef is still in vogue...

Which brings us to the case of Celebrity chef and thief Antony Worrall Thompson (other celebrity chefs are available...) ... Now, the Beard has not the competence, as Sir Thomas More would say, to decide whether Mr Thompson has a problem with kleptomania, or whether he just figured that self service checkouts are easy to fiddle and decided to get some free cheese... but it remains to be said that if Mr Worrall Thompson (who, along with Rick Stein shares the dubious accolade of being one of only two chefs who have never cooked on TV anything that the Beard has fancied eating... kudos instead to Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal, who never fail to cook at least one thing he does... and of course to Ainsley Harriot, whose chefing may not intrigue the hirsute, but whose celebritying is at least annoyingly entertaining... Roccky Horror anyone??) had been one of the uncelebrities who make up the mass of the populace, the question of treatment for the problem would have been easily solved by a big fine, an asbo, or a light prison sentence... or possibly the chopping of a a limb segment, depending on where you happen to be reading this....

The Beard, despite appearances, was once involved in the law enforcement business, dabbling in security guarding, private detection and in store security... the first two of which were to be honest, mainly composed of sitting in cold damp places while nothing much happened... but the in-store stuff... well, when uniformed(as opposed to uninformed, which is what my contract stated...) it amounted to standing in fairly warm, dry, and well lit places while nothing much happened, which allegedly was an improvement... it was the plain clothes undercover boys who had the excitement...

In all that time I spent undercover in supermarkets, I arrested and deterred (as the phrase goes) well over two hundred shoplifters... and after comapring notes with others in the profession, came to a few conclusions... and while it's still true that you can't tell a shoplifter by looking at them, there are subtle clues to follow that increase your collar rate... firstly, groups of teenagers... boys tend not to be shoplifting, in my experience... mucking about, yes, causing trouble, yes, but nicking, no... groups of teenage girls, especially the ones wearing far too much make up and far too few clothes, especially if accompanied by a couple of girls dressed a bit more modestly.... well, they tend to be the ones to watch... whereas boys and girls wandering about on their own... well, they're just as likely as each other...

Strangely, though, the people found stealing most often, and taking the most value stuff, weren't who we expected...now, most people I've asked expect it to be "gyppos" (!!) and pensioners, and homeless people, or chavs... and while these sections of the public aren't by any means without their dishonest representatives, it was very rare that we got any of them apart from the pensioners... and those pensioners we caught had something in common with the biggest group of shoplifters.... and I'll bet you can or can't guess what....

Well, let's just say that we almost never had any cases of genuine hardship caught shoplifting... the people who genuinely had nothing tended to come to the back door and take stuff out of the bins... often with the implied consent of the management... no, the great majority of shoplifters that we apprehended were quite well off by the standards of the day... even most of the old people we arrested were on quite decent pensions... one woman we caught was stealing clothes and food, then driving off in a brand new Volvo estate... in the days when that was seen as the equivalent of a BMW... turned out that her family was subsisting on a joint income of just under 60 grand... and that was nearly twenty years ago, when your money went a bit further... and she was the rule, rather than the exception...

Where the difference was really apparent though, was in their reactions to being caught... the teenagers would be either bolshy then scared, or instantly terrified... the few genuinely needy ones would be apologetic and ashamed... the middle class would be indignant and blame us for their predicament... they were usually horrified... not that they were thieves, not that they'd been caught, but that we had had the temerity to lay hands on them and tell them that they were in the wrong... they acted, almost to a woman (and it was nearly always the women doing it) as though it was their right to steal... and not a few times we would be treated to an audience with the husband a few days later... and that would go one of two ways... either Hubby would be arrogant and threatening, telling us in no uncertain terms that if we didn't drop any charges we and the store manager would be sacked and never work again (I recall no sackings ever occurring as a result...) or the Hubby would be very apologetic and assure us that wifey was getting treatment for her problem...

Now, maybe some of these people genuinely have a behavioural problem that they can't help... but I'm told by friends of the Beard with experience of such things that those with such problems tend to react with shame and uncertainty when confronted, rather than with arrogance and anger... and thereforre draw the conclusion that the only problem most of these women had was that they simply couldn't understand why they had to actually do the same thing as commoners and actually pay for stuff... Now, I have no idea how Mr Worrall Thompson behaved at his arrest, but I hope for his family, his friends, his fans and himself, that he was confused and apologetic... because that could point to him actually having some sort of real problem rather that just being dishonest... and dishonesty, as the Beard has possibly not mentioned, is usually a bad thing...

But I run the risk of digressing, and I'm sure this rant has gone on long enough... it remains only to be said that shops are actually quite hard to lift, although holding up banks is apparently far more tiring... so until we all know what we deserve and how to get it, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!