Honesty is the key —

— but it's the dishonesty that leads to the need for one.

On such a note then I approach the subject of my crime and punishment. But first I feel a need to wander off on a diversion. This morning I was taking my usual perambulation around the interweb thingy, starting as I often do at that pleasantly domestic coffee-shop that is Sharon's Blog, where I was tickled half to death with her hysterically funny account of a colonoscopy — and of a gastroenterologist who expressed an admiration for her teeth. I added (or rather I believed that I had added) a suitably dry comment of my own concerning the lack of depth of a dental pratcitioner's probings versus the surprising heights to which colonoscopists might ascend in their quests for interesting scenery. But ... well, hey! I get distracted a lot. I have a cat who is presently suffering from third degree cabin fever of a severity that even concentrated ear scratching does not ameliorate. Mirelly Lyra Zeelashishthra (who would have been Hotblack Desiato had she been a male) is very much a cat with attitude, most of it utterly insane; a lucky happenstance because it means that her nickname used only by me — Little Mad — is rather more apt than was intended when it was coined; it was originally a fond contraction of Little Madam ... mostly because she has, as has been said, a lot of hoity-toity feline attitude. It was, then, Little Mad's fault that I somehow reloaded the browser tab with my witty rejoinder to Sharon's colonoscopy escapade before it was fully and irrevocably posted.

My morning constitutional on the virtual surfboard is also a bit of an on off experience. I wander in and out as I punctuate my activities with cat-fondling, tea drinking, drug-taking and even calorie-refuelling; this morning I treated myself to a delicious bacon sandwich for example. So it was later that I got sidetracked again as, first I returned to Perspectacles to see what other comments had been added and then puzzlement as I found that my own limp contribution was conspicuously absent. Paranoia is a wonderful affliction. I don't actually suffer from paranoia in the official sense that I have a psychiatric opinion attesting to it, but I no longer suspect that I am alone in leaping rapidly and foolishly into the deepest pit of paranoid self-pity the moment the opportunity arises to place the blame for some oversight upon the general and indifferent, but peversely organised, resistance of the whole world to one's plans, ambitions and designs.

So all of this long-winded detour is by way explaining how I ended up taking a fascinated look at the blog of fellow Sharon fan. Heather's blog — Blog Blah Blah was where I ended up after studying her comments regarding Sharon's post. There, I read her self-critical musings as she discussed her own reluctance to share some secrets and her sudden realisation that it is not an issue; that no topic is, or should be, too shameful and too secret to share with the world that is mostly filled with one's friends and those that mostly love and respect us.

Heather's summation neatly catechised my own feelings and my recent arrest has made me realise that freedom is a thing to savour and not to take for granted as well as to draw my attention to the fact that there are few crimes that are beyond the pale. As a child, I was brought up under the Anglican aethos — though ours wase not a strictly church-based family faith — and my upbringing was soundly rooted in the basic principles of simple Christian goodness. I feel that is not a bad foundation for anyone's life. It does however begin, pretty much, with a code of ten cardinal rules that either seem pretty inflexible or else harshly foolish or both. A man who refuses point-blank to bear any kind of false witness is apt to find himself on the painful end of flying crockery if he expresses his honest opinion of his female companion's new hair cut ... and lest there be confusion on the matter there is no commandment against hitting hubby over the head with a frying pan; the matter only becomes a case for Mosesian law if the blow is violent enough to terminate the victim.

Handicapped, as so many of my contemporaries are then, by that odd Old Testamental codex that so shapes our moral outlook, both as to our own behaviour as well as in respect of our expectations of the behaviour of every-damned-one-else we find it hard to admit both the possibility of breaking laws; let alone the shame and ignominy of being caught.

The motorcycle I sold was a 1963 BSA with a sidecar. The sidecar was the fully enclosed kind that looks a little like a surgical boot or else, perhaps, a crudely homebuilt and hopelessly unaerodynamic aircraft fuselage. After I sold the damned thing, I realised that I had gained a sudden and imperative incentive to pile pressure upon my plans for relocation. Not being around when the crime was discovered seemed, at the very least, the wisest and only sane option. I figured that I had a fortnight. Luckily that was also the amount of time that I also claculated was needed. Unfortunately I tend to estimate projects that involve my own voluntary and self-motivated input with a vague and groundless optimism based — mostly — upon my limited, but not unsuccessful, experience at project management involving other people. It is impossible, I have to note with reluctance, to dismiss oneself from a task or project for sloth, procrastination or even incompetence. Never employ yourself would seem a promising axiom; well it would to an idle optimist like myself who tends to loiter around pessimism because it seems to involve rather less effort.

Ten days elapsed and I was at that juncture of a hot and sticky weekend that Douglas Adams memorably described as The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul. Nneedless to say, due to the heat and humidity, little work had been gotten from the recalcitrant workforce! I was facing a crisis and engaged in frantically replanning the outstanding work to be completed when the telephone rang and, like a lamb to slaughter &mdash more accurately like an Ealing comedy idiot behaving in the exact contrary manner to both common sense and standing orders — I answered it instead of leaving to it to ring and then using 1471 to ID the caller and decide for myself if I wished to return the call. It was the former partner calling to say that he wanted to arrange a trip down from the wilderness to collect his bike.

I went tharn. If you haven't read Watership Down that won't make a lot of sense. Technically only floppy-eared rodents can go tharn. Big, over-cerebrated apes tend to go into change of underwear scenarios. I cannot quite recall what I told him it but it was not related to any version of the truth. I also concluded the conversation with the distinct impression that he hadn't swallowed a word I had said and that if he was starting his car engine at that moment I had exactly six hours to run for the hills.

It was at that moment that it occurred to me that I would be depriving myself of the opportunity to experience, in the flesh, his reactions to the discovery of that aforementioned oily stain on the garage floor and its associated disturbed drift of eight years worth of autumn leaves that had blown in thru gaps and accumulated around the decaying metal and thereby creating a bizarrely Mad-Maxian harvest festival display in an otherwise unremarkable concrete and asbestos pre-fab garage.

To state the fact baldly: I simply had to stay around a week or two longer to see what would happen. I owed it to myself to witness the outcome because not to stay would have been the more unforgivable dishonesty ... the denial of a continuing and not entirely worthy (nor admirable) interest. My salacious tort needed to have its concluding full stop and I could not for any risk ignore the demands of my own catlike curiosity. I had to see it happen.

I saw.