Yay! I found the new topic button! I know right at the top on the right, but I type on an ancient laptop that was only bought to hook the internet to the telly and it has a very small screen. It was up there all along! What an idiot I must look (even more than usual). (Probably distracted by the adverts on the right).
Well I want to tell you what happened last night. i am not making this up. I decided to go out about 9pm, for a walk, as I do. What do I find outside my gate but a man, with a shopping trolley, literally right outside my gate. (it is a garage gate with a door inset kinda that you can open without opening the garage gate which runs on an electric motor. I rarely open the garage gate as I don't drive so don't really need to, I just use the door inset into the door, if you see what I mean)
So I asked can I help you, he starts running off down my local street. I think this is a bit strange so I run after him. Now I only have boots on not training shoes, and I am not bloody Usain Bolt, on the other hand he is hindered by having an empty shopping trolley that he seems insistent on keeping with him. It was empty, and he had an orange bag on his right shoulder (it may have been different colour but looked orange under the sodium lamps, could have been white I suppose). I gave chase and followed. He ran across the big street where all the buses go, to try to get away from me. At this point I am starting to think this is very strange. He dived down a back-street I know the street but not the name, there is a kiddie park on the corner, and round the park and up onto one of the big main streets, SzentMihaly Ut which leads off from the M3. At that point I gave up because I can't really chase him across eight lanes of traffic.
Very odd to me. I am used to seeing people with trolleys etc, indeed I have one myself that someoene abandoned that was handy for carting back the kitchen counters from across the street (big timber merchants there) together with my sackbarrow for smaller bits. I am quite used to seeing homeless people with shopping trolleys/carts full of empty beer tins etc (and you can do them a favour by giving them yours, we picked up about 100 I imagine on a short 2 mile walk, this Hungarian habit of dropping litter is very frustrating). What I do NOT expect to see at 9pm is a man outside my gate with an empty shopping trolley.
I imagine, since I hadn't my blinds down and the lamps were on, that he was casing the joint and that if he finds a nice easy theft he puts it in the trolley. It still seems an unlikely mode of conveyance to me, if you ask me. You can't really stand on a shopping trolley cos with its wheels it would go away from under it, although come to think of it now if you turned it upside down you could probably stand on its base (my windows on the street are about five feet up from the pavement/sidewalk because there is a slight slope, nothing excessive, from front to back, we are not talking the North Face of the Eiger here probably ten feet three metres from front to back).
How very odd. I gave chase as far as I could and he kept running away with his shopping trolley. He seemed peculiarly attached to his shopping trolley. Had he not been I could probably have caught him, I am not a quick runner by any means but with a bit of adrenalin that these things tend to kick into you, and I have a lot of stamina I am not quick but I have a lot of stamina, so perhaps he ran out of breath or something. He stopped at a house another house that he claimed to be his own, I was about 200 yards behind but caught ip with him and said is this your house? Sorry I just wanted to apologise for chasing you I thought you were a burglar. Off he starts running with his trolley again, patently not his house.
It is extremely odd, I can't quite make it out. Normal people if they are outside your gate they would say oh can I borrow a fiver or can I use your toilet, in any case they would ring the bell. The shopping trolley/cart is the bit that don't add up to me. It seems to me if you are going to go equipped for breaking an entering, a most unlikely mode of conveyance. But perhaps that's just a bluff he can then say to the police I was just returning this shopping trolley to the supermarket someone left it on the street (which does happen around here a lot, hence my one in the garage someone took from about half a mile away and could not be bothered to return, but it is a bit too broken to really return it).
I don't live in a high-crime area or anything, nor in a particularly posh area. How very odd.
Anyway that is my story I hope it amuses you. I really still can't make it out.