IT'S difficult to think of anything worth a pound or more that someone, somewhere hasn't tried to steal.
Even the old adage about things needing to be nailed down to protect them from thieves no longer applies.
It was only a few years ago that I and several neighbours woke up to find that someone had been through our front gardens removing a number of seriously heavy plant pots under cover of darkness.
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And that wasn't all. They had also taken a stone birdbath and a sundial after carefully chiselling them from their cement bases!
Right now many light-fingered professionals are limbering up for their busiest season, lifting purses and wallets from harassed Christmas shoppers or using the crowds to shield them as they help themselves to goodies from store shelves.
Meanwhile these outdoor, heavyweight crooks also have their own seasonal agenda.
And it's something far more valuable than mere garden ornaments.
Having noticed the worldwide rise in metal prices (presumably as they peruse the Financial Times over breakfast!), because of the huge industrial growth taking place in China and India, they have their sights on anything made of copper, lead, aluminium or even good old-fashioned iron.
According to Lancashire County Council leader Hazel Harding that means unscrewing road signs and even prising up drain covers and making off with them.
We have also had several incidents in the Blackburn area recently, one of which caused a power cut at the new hospital where people had apparently been attempting to steal power cables because of their valuable metal coatings.
It reminded me of a decade ago when the Rough Guide to Bulgaria warned tourists like myself who were using that country's roads to watch out for frequent large and deep potholes usually caused by thieves who had dug up the tarmac to steal copper covered cables buried beneath them.
But today's criminals aren't just causing inconvenience or possible injury.
We're told their activities are likely to lead to an increase in taxes not least to pay for increased insurance premiums because of the risk of damages claims from people who fall down unguarded manholes.
Police are castigated for not catching these metal Mafiosi but how realistic is it for them to arrest everyone lifting a back-street drain cover in the middle of the night?
Surely the answer is to license all scrap-metal dealers so strictly that they dare not buy from anyone who turns up in a van carrying such obviously stolen items.
Only putting real fear of lost livelihoods in front of these modern-day Steptoes will stop them.
And without a ready re-sale market no one in their right mind is going to spend their evenings unscrewing road signs.
Or is that just too simple an answer to the problem?
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