The Russians are stealing my rubbish

I promised someone I would show the little figure of Hermes and Dionysus after cleaning, hence this crappy photo.

It is difficult enough to see what is going on even when handling the real thing, so you don't stand much of a chance with this picture. The child Dionysus is being held to the left and his head would have been on the right side of Hermes's head. It has obviously blurred a lot over the years, so you sort of have to know what you are looking for. Put it this way, my friend is not going to retire on the profit from selling it to a museum or collector.

I would like to know how it ended up in her garden, but I think this will have to be categorised as one of life's little mysteries. Talking of little mysteries, how about this:

Last Thursday, our gull-proof black plastic rubbish bag was taken away along with the bin-liner of rubbish inside it. The council threaten to fine residents £70 for not using it, as the municipal gulls have been causing more and more problems by tearing up ordinary bags in their search for food and leaving rubbish strewn around the tourist-filled streets of Bath.

The bags have proved quite successful in the war against gulls, and because it is now breeding season and the gulls have chicks to feed, they are becoming more and more desperate for food. They have even been attacking adult ducks on the river, who dive underwater to escape them.

The bags were issued a couple of months ago, and each one is personalised with the address of the household it was issued to, so no chance of confusion about whose is whose.

I decided to look into who had taken it away by going through the CCTV footage of the shop below, with assistance from one of the assistants.

The screen is divided into four panels, one per camera. She enlarged the image which covered the rubbish bag, then fast-forwarded between 9.30am and 9.45am. One second the bag was there, the next it was not.

Gradually she narrowed the sequences down to the 5 minutes which must have been the time when the bag was taken, then discovered that the video jumped this period of time so the bag just appears to vanish in half a second. The section of video that must show the deed does not exist.

I think the KGB are stealing my rubbish and have hacked into the shop's CCTV system to destroy the evidence.