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It may help all concerned to ponder...
There is something of a yawning fissure between example and explanation into which Alan was bound to step. The crevasse was created, to my mind, by the inclusion of the following phrase in the Police response...
"To suggest that officers were called out whilst they were attending a Christmas party is WRONG..."
Let us, for the sake of argument, hold two things to be true: Mrs.Taylor is entirely honest and truthful. Many Public Servants have a thankless and complex task, The Police Service and the other Emergency Services especially so.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that into canteen drudgery comes a little cheer in the current season and that the menu has altered to suit the times. What was a roast chicken dinner is now turkey and trimmings, plum-duff now Christmas Pudding & Custard and that as an added bonus paper hats are available next to the tray-stack. What fun.
Enjoying such fare are two plain-clothes officers and as they are dining a mundane run-of-the-mill and fairly low-priority call is taken at the switch-board. The situation in the street becomes more and more complex and involved over time. The call goes out to these two diners, to the effect;Get your skates on (trouble at mill).
The dutiful pair cram the last mouth-full of pudding into their heads and head for their car. They chew, swallow and chew as they drive and prepare for what is ahead of them. A tricky situation, an everyday occurrence got somewhat out of hand.
[a little local knowledge needed here] These two upholders of the peace may have to park some way from the 'scene' and hot-foot it.
Ever mindful of the need to re-assure the public and perhaps just because they are an affable pair of characters in themselves they make light of the fact of their interrupted luncheon...
Time is an entirely elastic concept. The two minutes or so it has taken you, dear reader, to peruse what I have here written is one thing...to have spent that same amount of time dangling from the nearby snowy-white cliffs is quite another thing.
If only, on this one occasion, Police work had been left to the Police...