I wonder if, like me, you have never yet woken up in the morning and thought, “Today I shall rob a condom machine”. I suspect you haven’t. But three petty crooks in Berlin decided that’s what they’d do….on Christmas Day.
Not even at the lowest point of clichéd condescension did the Miss World Contest in its heyday use a voiceover -as Greta Stümpfel (36-24-35) from Wupperthal walked the cat walk – along the lines of, “Greta takes a keen interest in endangered species, and her ambition is to rob a condom machine without fear of detection”.
“You see Simpkins,” the senior officer very often said during 1950s War movies, “That’s the trouble with Gerry…he’s got absolutely no imagination”. Just how wrong can you be?
I mean, rob a bank – fine, that’s where the money is, allegedly. And even if it isn’t any more, who cares? It would be setting an excellent example to the unjustly poor everywhere.
Rob a jewellers. Now that makes sense: lots of precious stones and very high security….it’s a risk, although the payback could be tremendous.
But whyTF rob a condom machine? I mean, you’re on one of those quiz shows right, and you have to guess what the first word or phrase most of the audience thought of when they heard “condom machine”. And you say “wealth beyond the dreams of avarice”. Or even worse, “Christmas Day”.
It doesn’t end there. The Three Stooges decided that, rather than gemmy the bloody thing open, they’d buy some explosives to do the business. There are three of you sitting in a damp, scruffy Berlin flat on Christmas Eve, the idea is put forward to get rich by geligniting a condom machine as an easy-money scheme, and none of the Teutonic trio say “On the whole, I’d rather rob a reservoir”.
Where the caper did end was in one of the robbers getting himself killed. It seems he decided to leave his car door open – which was two metres from the doomed machine – because he wanted to watch.
“It ended in tragedy,” you might say, but I don’t. I regard the bloke’s demise as one of the most obvious acts of clinically targeted natural selection I’ve ever come across.
Indeed, the only tragedy in this attempt at surreal lawlessness is that they were caught so quickly. Otherwise, somebody could’ve reported that “Police are looking for a fundamentalist Catholic with very short term financial problems and a history of cerebral muddle”.
Should we be in the same EU that produced these people? Should anyone in the EU be in the same Union as the Germans?
It is a sobering thought….and we should all take it into 2016 on the way to voting Leave.
The Slog 