the law: criminals

When I was a kid, I used to beleive that "There is always a law against doing anything interesting." .... and still today, i cant resist beleiving it..

I used to believe…

many years ago my husband andi were discussing peter sutcliffe's arrest. we said,"oh, he will plead insanity"insanity this" "insanity that"
our daughter, who would be,ooh probably 10 yrs old at the time,said but what has santy(claus) got to do with it?
then again, i always thought, as a child, everyone was happy when they got married. how wrong was I

I believe my mother once told me that you had to go to a special school to learn how to be a criminal. I imagined all these kids sitting in desks learning how to rob and kill people. I also imagined they'd get homework assignments like, "Go kill someone."

When I was about 8, I heard the term 'kerb crawling' on the news. Upon asking what it meant, my mum informed me it was when people were walking along a kerb, trying to break into the cars parked in the street. I held this belief for about 10 years after that!

I used to believe that Bill Stickers was a real person! I thought he must have been really bad because he had his name plastered all over town and they kept saying he will be prosecuted.I felt sorry for him. I used to imagine what he looked like. Maybe he was on the run from the police or something.

Underneath The Westway road in West London the phrase "BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED" was stencilled on the pillars in big black letters. I used to believe that Bill Stickers had done something for which he was going to be prosecuted, but I though it was really unfair that his fate was being advertised so publicly.

When I was little, I thought rape was when a man would approach a woman on the street and tear off all her clothes. (No sex, just ripping off her clothes. I didn't know that sex was something that anyone other than mommies and daddies did together.)

I used to believe…

for some strange reason, I used to believe that criminals always ate prawns. And when my grandad got his car stolen and it was dumped at tescos i thought the robbers had stoped to buy prawns

When I was younger I saw some graffiti in an under pass, My Nan told me that a vandal had done it.
I thought about vandals and decided that they were men in suits with big tanks of paint on the back. (like a space suit)

I always thought that shoplifting is about lifting the shop from the ground.

When I was little I used to believe that the shop owners were letting the lights on to scare the thieves. And I was asking my self: how can they be so stupid (the thieves). If me, a small child I know the lights are turned on why they still risk to go in and steal?

One day, while my mother was driving I heard on the radio that there had been a shooting and that a certain man was helping the police with their investigations. I said to my mum "aww, that's nice". She nearly drove off the road through laughing so much. You see, I'm from Barbados, and the above phrase is used euphemistically to describe an arrest, whereas I thought some nice man from the village was taking the police around, introducing them to everyone etc

i could never understand why all countries were trying to attract tourists: who would want to have all that bombing and kidnapping? i imagined all this evil in the disguise of sunburned people in shorts wearing too large sunglasses.

when I was younger I was watching the news and it said a girl was raped. I thought they said she was "raked" so I believed that a guy would take a rake and scratch the girl's body with it.

I used to believe that when the news reported that a woman got "raped"... it meant someone caught her and hit her with a garden rake, or raked her up her back leaving nasty scratches.... and thats why it was such a horrable thing when a woman is "raked"

My father always told me that if i did anything remotely impolite, that the police would come and throw me into politeness jail. (this was prompted by me gargling at the dinner table)