1 EAGLETON NOTES: Only On Lewis

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Tuesday 14 July 2020

Only On Lewis

could you see this:



When I came to live in Lewis in 1975 leaving the beautiful Cheshire village of Lymm and my excellent job in the Manchester satellite of Trafford (and with a membership of the Lancashire County Cricket Club which was right opposite my office), never did I for one moment think that the Outer Hebrides would end up being where not only my body but also my heart would end up. After all I only intended to come for two years.

Back in the 70s no one locked doors or took ignition keys out of cars. Theft of something from a private individual was a rarity. Okay it's true that occasionally sheep went missing from the common grazing and were 'found' in another township. Sometimes a car left in Stornoway's main car park in the town centre would disappear on a Friday or Saturday night when someone needed to get home.  I recall one chap who regularly took a car and parked it outside his house. 

It was an interesting peculiarity of the law that it was very hard to prove the theft of a motor car. Theft involves an intention permanently to deprive someone of something. A person who 'stole' a car would always argue that it would have been returned the next morning. So the only thing actually stolen was a few bobs worth of petrol which was hardly worth a prosecution. Of course all that's changed now and the loophole has been closed.

However theft of personal property is still relatively rare.  Where else could you leave a parcel for collection by the Royal Mail propped up against the township post box?

48 comments:

  1. With my immediate neighbours, I am very trusting and don't mind any mail or parcel carriers leaving something that is too large for my mailbox on the steps outside the front door. But my front door is not really visible from the street, so that is an advantage. As the couple living downstairs are almost always home, and spend almost all their time sitting on their patio underneath my windows, I often go out for a walk leaving the windows wide open, trusting that nobody will climb up there and steal my valuables.
    But I strongly disapprove of taking anything that does not belong to the taker, unless one has asked and the owner has agreed. I wouldn't even take a paper clip from someone else's desk without asking.

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    1. Meike, I have to say that I, too, disapprove of taking things that don't belong to me. Not in your case but in any place I've worked I'd not have hesitated to pick up a paperclip because they would have been owned by the Council. However in Legal Departments paper clips are banned because it is far too easy for something to get accidentally attached to something to which it aught not to be attached.

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  2. That seems pretty normal for round here. I did lose my campsite mower petrol but the culprit was soon found. She said how did you know it was me? I said you are the only person for miles that has a petrol car. The rest of us use red diesel like all normal honest folk.
    That post box is lacking something. I remember now what it is.......Totty.

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    1. Adrian, I think a lot of rural Scotland is pretty luck really. And that includes the red diesel! I do actually have that particular post box with totty but I think she might be a tad miffed if I used it. But you have an imagination.

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    2. Not imagination, memory...........You posted the post box twice before once with your niece and then again with another lassie.

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    3. Adrian, you never cease to amaze me. I remember my niece posting a letter there and asking me to take a photo and I've done so of my brother. I can only think of one other person of whom I have a photo but I didn't recall blogging about her posting a letter. However I did. So she would not have been miffed had posted it after all.

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    4. I never forget a handsome Collie and the owner was fit as well.

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  3. I don't think anyone would risk leaving a parcel like that, I'd give it less than a 50/50 chance of being properly collected, but people tend to be pretty considerate and law abiding in our quiet Yorkshire village.

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    1. Tasker, I think I could confidently say that in the township the chances of it being pinched are zero. Apart from anything else there is nothing one does here during daylight hours that isn't seen by someone.

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  4. It would be at more risk of a good wetting in a cloud-burst wouldn't it? As for 'borrowing without permission' - I believe it is called conversion.

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    1. Tigger, the post is collected bang on the dot most days and there was an assessment made by the leaver as to whether it was going to rain. My view was 'yes' and I offered a plastic bag. Her view was 'no'. She, of course, was correct.

      When I did law exams I was in England and conversion occurred (past tense because I don't know whether it still exists) when someone interfered with the personal property of another, for example by taking it or withholding it without lawful justification. However it is not a crime so the police have no role. It is a common law tort and the injured party would have to sue for damages. Unless the car were to be damagesd it would be pretty pointless spending vast sums for nothing. In Scots Law it would be delict and, as far as I know (I never read Scots Law) there is no equivalent. I am open to correction though.

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  5. It was the same over here when we came to live on the island in the early 1990s. We rarely locked our doors, or the car. Unfortunately things have gradually changed. Our small hamlet is still pretty safe but burglaries are now all too frequent in most of the towns.

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    1. JayCee, I can't pretend that it's perfect here any more and I'm sure that suburbia is nowhere near immune from theft. I suspect, however, that the "good honest burglars" are few and far between now and criminals engage in more lucrative pursuits.

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  6. Oh dear, seems you are still getting nonsense posted!

    I would have thought it would be similar round here, but they steal property instead! Would never have thought that could happen. It is wonderful that such a life still exists on Lewis. Perhaps we should have moved up there instead?! Winters too long for me unfortunately ;)

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    1. Serenata, it was my own fault for saying that it rarely happened to my current post. Just looking however I can tell you that so far today (it is 1620) I have deleted 19 spam posts which were directed to Eagleton Notes (9 of them copies of the one you saw). Apart from that one all the others were caught by moderation which, given their content, is a Good Thing.

      I was smiling when you talked of stealing land. Not because it's funny: far from it. But because it is one of the things with which I occasionally had to deal because fences had been put in the wrong place either accidentally or on purpose many years previously. In fact here in Eagleton several small pieces of land appeared in two sets of deeds.

      It's not so much the length of the winters that gets to most people but the shortness of the days in midwinter. And, for some people, the length of the days in midsummer.

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  7. "I recall one chap..." That's like when people sometimes say "I have a friend who..." when they really mean themselves!

    You must have done something very, very bad when you lived in Lymm and worked in Trafford - to be sentenced to so many years on The Isle of Lewis. Perhaps you applauded when Geoffrey Boycott drove yet another loose ball to the boundary as Lancashire were crushed once again by their mighty rivals from across The Pennines.

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    1. I think, YP, I can say without fear of contradiction that I have never taken a car from town without the owner's permission.

      Oddly I never witnessed a Lancashire v Yorkshire match although I did see one of the best test match overs I can ever recall with 3 sixes. Big hitting like that didn't occur too frequently in a match in those days. And yes, I would have applauded Geoffrey Boycott if he had been the hitter. Cricket was a sportsman's game.

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  8. Wow, that really is remarkable! I think I'm with Tigger in being more worried about a rain shower - or a passing dog deciding to mark its territory....

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    1. Jenny, I told Tigger the thinking behind the rain possibility. This is crofting country. Very few dogs roam free and none in this area. Everyone seems to have a dog or dogs and walk it or them but only on a lead.

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    2. That's interesting. I must say I prefer the idea of a dog having a job to do to one that just roams around. I think they're happier that way, too.

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    3. Jenny the number of working dogs up here is few these days because there are few sheep compared with previous decades. However there are also more incomers and with incomers comes pets. When I came to the Island I recall no indigenous pet dogs and lots of working dogs. Now it's quite the reverse.

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  9. Not many places for sure. I love the places where honesty and trust still exist.

    Lovely to hear you mentioning Lancashire Cricket Club being opposite your office, my brother used to work in offices built alongside it, and would wander up to the top floor to eat his sandwiches in his lunch hour, to catch a half hour of cricket through the window. Then some days leaving early with his flexi-time to watch the end of the days play.

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    1. Well, A Smaller Life, I don't believe you've commented before. So welcome and thank you.

      I wonder how long ago your brother worked there. More recently than I obviously but it would still be interesting. You said 'alongside the LCC'. My office block was on the opposite side of the A6 diagonally opposite the grounds which were opposite the old Stretford Town Hall.

      We also have another tenuous link in that my paternal grandmother was born in Blaenau-Ffestiniog.

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  10. Nicely written where the photo is explained at the end. Yes, it was that way here where houses weren't locked and keys left in the ignition.

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    1. Red, I imagine that your rural areas would have been much the same as ours.

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  11. I don't think you could leave a package like that in NZ, sadly there are too many dishonest opportunists around now. When I grew up, and even when I first married, we had no need to lock up the house if we went out. Things have changed over the years.

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    1. Margaret, I'm afraid that you are right. Generally speaking there is little need to lock a house here even now but I do when I go out and even at night - it only takes one person. In New Zealand we liced on a lifestyle plot and were isolated but close to Napier so a target for some criminals.

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  12. In the whole 47 years we've lived in our small village, I've never locked the door (unless going away for several days), nor have I taken the keys from the car. We leave post in out letter boxes with a clothes peg on the key to let the postie know that there's something there. It makes for a more pleasant atmosphere knowing that folk are honest. I did have a plastic trug stolen from my veg garden, but I think it was a holiday maker who filled it with my apples to take home!

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    1. Cro, life here is very largely the same - hence the post. However, I'm afraid to say that there are now a few opportunists not averse to theft. So far as I am aware, though, there has never been a housebreaking here. There is a sad story of a kleptomaniac in the '70s but that's an exception.

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  13. I will miss my mailman who left large parcels under shelter by my back door rather than under the mail box if it looked like rain. There was no obligation for him to come up the long driveway. I wonder if they do that here in the village? You will probably remember that my little white house had no door key; so far I've been good about remembering to lock the door while I'm out now that I'm a townie.

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    1. Pauline, I do remember your house having no key. Indeed I remember so much about your house. It was exceedingly friendly too. It's strange how an inanimate object can be friendly or unfriendly but houses can. I do hope that your new house will be equally so. I do hope that you have an obliging postie.

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  14. On a world scale that is really remarkable but it really doesn't surprise me about Lewis. Like Jenny, I would be concerned about rain or passing dogs. Especially dogs

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    1. Kylie, fortunately dogs don't roam free here. The person concerned had decided that it would not rain before the post came. I thought otherwise. She was correct. However if he had been late she would have been wrong.

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  15. Until recently I have never locked my doors
    I live in a tiny village
    A scrout from nearby town put pale to that
    He came up to the village one afternoon and robbed 3 houses

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    1. John, it's good to see you here. Fortunately we are not surrounded by towns with massive transient populations like you are. Interestingly I'd never heard the term 'scrout' before. Given that it's quite a targeted word I rather like it. I suppose 'low-life' would be the nearest word that I knew. Interesting, too, that you assumed that it was a man (which, statistically, it probably was) because house-breaking was never traditionally a woman's crime.

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  16. Here, City, South Coast of England, most parcels you will need to be signed for. Nothing ever left outdoors.

    As to theft. My car was once broken into. That's the official story. Truth is I hadn't locked it. The joys of early motherhood when you have a freshly baked human being on your mind, not the mundane. All consuming. A mother's heart. Anyway, and this is the point of my story, and also a lesson in how to sweat the small stuff. They, whoever "the" were, stole the radio. Many many hundred pounds worth of it. Great. Neat job. My take on it: They did NOT steal the CAR.

    U

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    1. Ursula, since Covid-19 we've not had any parcels signed for at all either sent or received. The postie certifies that he's delivered it. To be honest with very few exceptions that's always the way here. My mail is left in my porch and that's it. I feel amazingly lucky (I hope that I'm not tempting fate) not to have had a car broken into since I worked in Liverpool City Centre in 1962. Car's then were hardly secure anyway. I would call your take on it playing the Glad Game. Just like Pollyanna.

      You've just given me another two blog posts - thank you.

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  17. It's certainly not something you'd see in the city here... I suppose there may still be remote islands off the coast of Sweden where it could happen too, though. - Pauline's comment triggered a memory. In my childhood, the house where my m. grandparents lived was situated in very rural surroundings. They did lock the front door when they went out - but hung the key on a nail under a bench on the front porch, right beside the door... The house is still there, but since many decades surrounded by lots of other houses close to one of the most disreputable housing estates in the city (with high crime rate etc). I doubt that the present owners my grandpa's house have continued the tradition of where to "hide" the key!

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    1. Yes, Monica, the key was always under a plant pot, the front mat or whatever and, of course, easy to find.
      Nowadays many people have a keysafe next to the door with a combination - with half the world knowing the combination!

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    2. That's something I've never seen - but on second thought, I'm not in the habit of going around looking at a lot of front doors to private houses. Where I live, the main entrances are open during the day but locked at night, and then you need a proper key to get in. No door intercom or code system. (Sometimes kids arriving home late shouting loudly from down below to try to catch their parents' attention, though...)

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  18. Must be a lovely safe place you live in though Graham. Sometimes one of the joys of living in a small town area is that you can be trusting with others, everyone knows everyone else I guess.

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    1. Yes, Amy, it is lovely living in a very safe place. On the whole, too, everyone helps everyone else.

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  19. I live in a place (Long Island) where the news is regularly peppered with video clips from people's doorbell video cameras (how sad we need these) of people stealing packages off their porches... so no, no one in their right mind would leave a package for delivery outside of the mailbox.

    It's gotten so bad lately that they've replaced the public mailbox hatches with armored slits - the pull out hatches were, apparently, being used by hoodlums to pour stuff in there or put garbage in on top of the mail. Also, the boxes have been turned backward from the curb so you can no longer drive up and drop your mail in. You have to get out of the car and walk around, then try and cram your envelope through the armored slit. If you have a piece of mail wider than the opening, to the post office you must go.

    Sad.

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    1. Marcheline, I'm just going back over recent past posts because I've discovered that I've missed some comments - like this one and Beatrice's. That is a very sad state of affairs which you describe. So far as I'm aware it hasn't got that bad anywhere in the UK yet.

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  20. It is nice that a package that doesn't fit in the post box could be left near it and that honestly would not happen where we live now. We have a different issue in that while there is a secure package delivery room in the mill apartment here, the problem is that delivery folks, notably Amazon, leave packages outside the room instead of using a code to access it and leave them inside.

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    1. Beatrice, apologies for the late response. I was wondering how a private courier service would know the number and then I recalled that Amazon actually ask you to put it on the order so it must be on the delivery instructions. So that presumably means lazy couriers.

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