The Elders of Ebbsfleet Watergarden City discuss the groundwater issue

On the news today was the story of a gang of some ten thieves who spent two months digging a tunnel to get into a cash machine. They got away with £80,000. Apart from being just 25% of what Wayne Rooney earns every week, if you work it out on the basis of an £8,000 haul each, one is left wondering why they went to all that trouble when they could’ve earned £1,000 a week anyway as G4S security guards. I suspect this episode is yet another sign of the Osborne austerity beginning to bite: I’m waiting for the next shocker, which might for example be about how criminals bored their way into the main RBS vault, only to find 125 unused luncheon vouchers, and the moth-eaten shirts of some small business entrepreneurs.

Just think how much easier it would have been to honey-trap Rooney with the promise of sex with a grandmother, and then demand a ransom from Old Trafford.

The cash machine, as it happens, was in Salford – where things have been awful for years now: £8,000 in Salford can bribe an entire hangar full of cops. In London, by contrast, crooks remain much more upmarket. They proved this by terrifying staff at a Mayfair jewellers this afternoon – wielding axes as a sign of their determination to nick the stock…having turned up in full Health & Safety riot gear riding designer scooters. The automatic grilles came down to foil the attempt, but the police took half an hour to turn up.

Given the sheer workload involved in both charging the entire staff of Radio 2 with bestial paedophilia and test driving Mayor Johnson’s new water cannon, I find this entirely understandable. Londoners must start to get used to the reality of the Met’s role these days. Grant Shapps is, as I write, preparing the brief for a new vigilante force (working title Volkspolizei) because the idea is to rebrand the London police as The Metapo – the Metropolitan Arselicking Political Operatives. The training brief has been awarded to G4S, who will also be doubling as Bingo-callers in the newly privatised Slaveworkers’ holiday organisation Strength Through Joy.

It was a delightful 21 degrees here today with a cooling wind, so I was in the garden mending two benches, and designing a third one from the waste wood so thoughtfully provided by the builders. The garden furniture I have repaired or built from scratch represents a unique cross between the bench and the rocking chair. This is because I am more of a hammer and nails man than a mortice-friendly woodworker. The slightest twitch of the buttocks makes my benches rock back and forth in a most pleasing manner. This is a gap in the market, and I shall be engaging the services of one of London’s top creative hotshops ‘Cynthia’ to handle the online digi-ull marketing.

My Grammar School woodwork teacher told Dad at a PTA meeting in 1961 that I was the only pupil he’d ever had who could blunt a chisel by simply removing it from the rack. I was also the only kid who ever ruined both plane and vice without a single wood-shaving being produced, and the only one never to progress beyond the exercise. Mr Jones the woodwork master told Mr Cheetham the metalwork teacher of my ability to behave like antimatter, and so when we started metalwork in the second year, old Cheetham suggested I read a book during lessons. This I duly did.

I have a chum – Hugh – a very fine artist who produces canvases that give solid objects the same appearance as those in Bacon triptychs, but painted with a haunting still life atmosphere vaguely after Dali’s middle period stuff. He says to me that he starts with an idea, but then something takes over halfway through….and leads him somewhere else that is entirely unexpected. It’s the same with me and carpentry. I am to working in wood what Jeremy Hunt is to social compassion.

At last, our Mayoral election candidates in the commune have declared themselves. There are eight of them, and four have the same surname….on account of a husband, a wife and their two kids all going for the Big Prize. My neighbour Yvette looked blank when I asked if this might cause family disharmony. “Mais non,” she replied, “If just one of them is elected, the others will all enjoy the influence”. She has a point.

Outgoing Mayor Maurice, meanwhile, is settling down to retirement at the age of 82. He is now the second-longest serving Mayor in France, and also holds the Blue Riband for being the longest serving Mayor in Lot et Garonne history. He had a distinguished service record during the Algerian troubles of the 1950s, but always seemed to me rather too willing to show everyone where several machine gun bullets had pierced his loins sixty years ago. This was especially obvious after a few sherberts at the annual Salle des fêtes piss-up.

Tonight here, for the first time this year we have a clear, star-filled night – but with a mild wind from the south. According to the Meteo, we are in for some changeable cloudy stuff with intermittent showers for a few days. The farmers will be happy: but for me, mild temperatures and a little rain mean more growing of the grass, requiring more mowing of the grass. There is an upside and downside to everything. Mind you, there is also an ever-present backside in contemporary life: most of these are plonked onto the green benches of Westminster, and the boardroom chairs on Wall Street. Of late, such arseholes have mastered the art of speech. We can only pray that it’s reversible.

Earlier at The Slog: Why Osborne’s Budget was a faithful straight-armed salute to neoliberalism