If you decide to do something illegal enough to cause the police to come round and tear your house to bits looking for evidence, take a tip from me. Get yourself a four-year-old first. There is nothing they can’t lose.
Years ago toast in VHS recorders was all the rage. How quaint that seems now. DVDs slide perfectly behind fitted cupboards, 20p pieces stack beautifully in car cigarette lighter sockets (efficiently fusing them in the process) and Play-Doh finds a wonderful and permanent home in USB connectors.
What makes this worse is that after I’ve been searching fruitlessly for some vital object, I’ll ask Annabel and she’ll know exactly where it is. ‘The TV remote? It’s here, Daddy,’ she said, leading me to the loo. No, she hadn’t put it in. That would have been too obvious, and wouldn’t have gone round the U-bend. No, she’d taken the chance to secretly wedge it in the cistern when we were replacing a fragrant blue-water-producing block. Half submerged and jammed solid, it made the perfect water-obstacle for her Barbies.
And let’s face it, nothing beats treading hard in your bare feet on an upturned three pin plug whilst thundering down the stairs. The pain makes a lemon-juice-filled papercut seem like a caress. When this happened to me, I traced the wire back (through blinking tears) to an electric razor. My electric razor, which I’m certain had been left upstairs.
But it’s not all bad news. Things do turn up. The torso of a scarred Carebear in our bed, for example. That razor-sharp Lego brick in the towel I applied vigorously to my tenderest parts. The soggy kitchen paper which fell out of a previously reliable clamshell Nokia. And, unfortunately, the 200,000 packs of contraband cigarettes the police were looking for. Remember: while kids are very good at hiding things, they are also extremely susceptible to bribery from law officials. Particularly if there’s sweets involved.