An Officer Calls
I’m not sure what SOP is for the police back home, but phone calls at 11:45pm are surely not part of it, so I was a little surprised last night to receive a call from an officer telling me that they’ve found my bike! Not my most recent one, although predictably I haverecently lost that one too (that’s 3 for 3). I was going to mention it but I’m getting a little bored (that is, embarrassed) of writing every time I lose a bike. You wouldn’t have thought this would be a problem, would you? No, this is one of my two bikes that had previously been nicked, though I don’t know which one yet. It was found in Aichi prefecture, which is at least a couple of hours away by bike and probably longer, and given that it was stolen a few months ago it’s probably had a number of “owners” in the intervening period.
Getting it back might still prove to be a chore. I didn’t just receive one call, I got three, at varying stages of the early hours and all in Japanese. Given my lack of proficiency and semi-comatose state, for all I know I might actually have told them to destroy the bike and turn it into a modern art sculpture for the public’s delight and edification. Still, hope springs eternal that I interpreted correctly and that they’ll be calling again on the 26th, on which day my sole mission will be to be standing next to a Japanese person when it happens. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the one time they called there wasn’t a single Japanese person around to help me out. I might has well have been in England for all my geographical location did me…