There are people you meet who open your eyes to new possibilities with their way of looking at the world, and their experience of it. I met one such person last night, and these are just two of the stories she told me:

Andrew is a seven stone mathematician, who is not noted for his practical take on things. Which means he’s not ideally suited for a particular job that comes up, as a debt collector. Nevertheless, this is exactly what he ends up doing. And he turns up at the door of a well-known local conman, Ronnie.

Being a pretty capable conman, Ronnie persuades Andrew that he’d do well to move in with him: he needs someone with a brain to help him capitalise on an investment opportunity that’s come his way: $2 million of Uncle Sam’s money to put into pickling. And so, Andrew leaves behind the world of debt collection and becomes a pickler. Of garlic. He spends a considerable amount of his own money on equipment while waiting for the American money to turn up, before realising that it never will.

By this point, Ronnie is no longer on the scene. He’s apparently looking for production partners in the former Soviet Union. Only, when Andrew looks at what’s on the computers he’s paid for, it seems Ronnie is actually intent on finding himself a Russian bride. Leaving Andrew with nothing to show for their joint venture but a crate of jarred pickled garlic, and several thousand pounds of credit card debts.

Onto cheerier things. An aviary, in fact. Which is where our heroine is one summer day when she spots a couple of serious looking gents with balaclavas and what she only realises in retrospect are sawn-off shotguns. It’s when she sees the news that evening, which includes a description of her in the company of the two men, that things get really odd.

Calling the police to tell them what she knows, she’s brought in for questioning that lasts more than a week. It takes a while for it to dawn on her that this is because one of the cops fancies her, and is stringing things out to see if she’ll fall for him. She doesn’t. But she does hit it off with the young woman officer in charge of fingerprinting, who she gets hammered with one Friday afternoon when there’s not much happening.

And there’s more where this came from, believe me. Expect updates from the same source, a Schehezarade if ever I met one.