Crouch, bind, set! My rugby tackle failed to stop a thief
as she fled with her swag

WOMAN DOWN: Artist’s impression of the scene outside Dismore’s chemist, skilfully composed by Drone Laboratories and, er, Google

For an organised crime gang, they seemed a bit clueless. Young, too.

There were three of them, girls in their late teens, perhaps early twenties. And they’d just had their collars felt.

I turned up at my local pharmacy to collect a prescription and found I couldn’t get in. The pharmacist, who has been robbed too often, was at the door, preventing the gang from getting away.

I’ve called the police, he told them. They tried to push past him but he blocked their way, determined that if his suspicions were correct, they would pay for it.

One of the girls was tall and attractive with inch-long scarlet fingernails encrusted with fake gems. Another was calm and tough-looking. The third was built like England prop forward Ellis Genge. They carried bags containing what looked like Christmas presents.

Fingernails put a hand on the pharmacist’s forearm gave him a winsome smile, cocked her head coquettishly and said something I could not hear through the closed door.

But he wasn’t to be swayed. He ordered them to take off their coats. The smile vanished from the face of Fingernails.

Reluctantly, they removed their jackets and handed over stuff they obviously had not paid for. They thought, hoped, that this might earn their release.

Still the pharmacist was unmoved. He had called the police and he wasn’t letting them go until officers had spoken to the girls.

The fat lass put her hands together as if to pray and beseeched him: “Peez! Peez!” Romanians, I thought.

The pharmacist shook his head but there was beginning to be a logistical problem. Quite a scrum had formed outside the shop, of people who were waiting to go inside.

Meanwhile, inside, some legitimate customers were trapped by the swoop and wanted to go home.

The pharmacist relented a little and told one of his assistants to open the door to let the genuine customers out.

The first to leave shot a look of contempt at the girls and told them: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

That’s when it happened.

Ellis Genge and Fingernails made a break for freedom. Now, I have often wondered what I would do in such circumstances.

In the event, I went into rugby mode, as if I were defending the try line. It wasn’t too far from the truth with Ellis Genge charging at me.

I grabbed the pair of them and bundled Fingernails back inside the shop. My grip on Genge was more flimsy and she managed to break loose.

As she legged it, she slipped and crashed to the pavement. She scrambled to her feet and kept running, keening in panic.

There was a time when I might have given chase but I’m too old for that malarkey now. I let her go.

Besides, I hadn’t got my prescription. The pharmacist let me in and as I passed the girls the tough one was on her phone. To Bucharest? Or the encampment outside John Lewis in Oxford Street?

Who knows? But I collected my meds and hoped the excitement wouldn’t give me a heart attack before I got them home.

Later, a family friend noticed police vehicles outside the shop, so it seems the Met responded. But it is unclear whether anyone was arrested or charged.

However, the pharmacist got his stuff back and so a warning may have been deemed enough.

Meanwhile, police in our part of West London claim they are getting on top of the shoplifting scourge.

The number of thefts is said to be down as officers target serial offenders, according to a report in our local news website.

Sergeant Gareth O’Donnell told the site: “Feedback from most of the shops we spoke to is that shoplifting is at a much lower level than it was 18 months ago, which I have no doubt is in large part due to proactive targeted activity we have been doing.”

Tell that to the man who runs my chemist’s shop.

*****

The first day of the second Ashes Test match was coming to a close and it looked as if Australia might have to bat for 20 minutes or so under lights against 90 miles an hour Jofra Archer with a hard-to-see pink ball.

So Aussie skipper Steve Smith started to change his field after every delivery, moving everyone a yard to the right or left, or moving a man up to short leg, a position that requires pads, helmet and a protective box to be brought on to the field and put on by the fielder.

It was annoying time-wasting and it brought this comment from, I think, former England opening bowler Steven Finn on commentary: “I think the umpire should word him up.” 

Translation? Well, your guess is as good as mine but he might have meant: Have a word.

*****

The row over whether Nigel Farage was a racist, anti-semitic bully at his public school, Dulwich College, proves again that politics is an irony-free zone.

Farage hit back at the BBC zealots pestering him over the allegations by some school contemporaries, pointing out that when he was  a pupil, the corporation was screening shows such as It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum and Till Death Us Do Part.

He said that the BBC had used blackface in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, racist language in Till Death Do Us Part and allowed Bernard Manning to tell homophobic gags on prime time telly. It was double standards, he said.

Leaving aside that this amounts to at least a partial confession, at first glance, he has a point. Farage was saying that attitudes were different then. That certain subjects were not off limits, either for politicians or humorists. All true.

But he forgets that the shows he chides the Beeb for making were, in their own small way, quite subversive. In Till Death Do Us Part, Alf Garnett was played by Warren Mitchell, a Left-wing Jew who relished the role because it allowed him to mock the prejudices Alf espoused.

Its writer, Johnny Speight, who was born in Canning Town, down the road from Alf’s beloved West Ham football club, also wanted to ridicule the attitudes of the times by presenting Garnett as a bigoted working class Tory layabout.

It worked. Too well, as it happens. Many viewers, instead of being repelled by Garnett, sympathised and identified with him. They laughed not at him, but with him.

Blackface, or at least brownface (otherwise known as makeup) was used in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum  to make Indian-born actor Michael Bates more authentic and convincing in his role as Rangi Ram, the cheerful bearer for the comical British Army concert party.

Bates played him as a man who admired the Raj and regarded himself as British by adoption. But writer Jimmy Perry gave him plenty of lines craftily satirising the British.

And Bates, who spoke fluent Urdu and had served as a captain in the Gurkhas, would point out that, as the other two Asian characters were played by Pakistani and Bangladeshi actors, he was the only genuine Indian in the show.

Farage is no modern-day Hitlerian figure. He’s Flashman, a bombastic chancer, a pub bore with saloon bar acolytes. But if he didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

He is a gadfly, who has had more effect on political thinking than almost anyone in recent times. But he will never be Prime Minister.

And that is the greatest irony of all.

*****

Don’t you love a gin and tonic before Christmas lunch? Not the sort of G&T you might get in a pub – two measly ice cubes, a slice of lemon from a week-old tub and warm tonic water shooshed in with a hose. No, no, no. This is how you do it…

Take a tall glass and fill it with ice (five or six cubes). Cut the end off an unwaxed lemon and run it round the rim, then squeeze a few drops into the glass.

Pour in a hefty measure of Tanqueray or Plymouth gin – about a treble – and top up with Fever Tree tonic water from the fridge.

With a peeler, take a strip of peel from your unwaxed lemon – you don’t want the white pith underneath – trim the ragged edges, twist it into a spiral and drop it into the glass.

Finally, the secret, magical ingredient: four or five juniper berries, lightly crushed under the blade of a kitchen knife. Not only do they look good but your guests will ask you what they are. When you tell them, mention that juniper is one of the key botanicals that give gin its distinctive aroma and taste.

When they’ve finished, they will want another. That’s okay, they can always catch the King’s speech on iPlayer.

*****

Event of the week in these parts? Bizarrely, it’s the reopening of our Marks and Spencer food store yesterday. They bought three neighbouring buildings and knocked them through to make a vast nosh emporium.

Those who turned up for the grand opening could have their picture taken with Percy Pig. The queue stretched way down the street.

We sidled along for a look. Very impressive. And rammed. Meanwhile, Waitrose, which has been shouldering the burden of middle class expectations during the months-long closure, was reportedly almost empty and had a despondent air.

The store’s return is a tonic for M&S, which is still recovering from the cyber attack which cost it 99 per cent of its profit for the first half of the year.

RICHARD DISMORE

10 December 2025