Ratlike cunning to tell a dog's tail

2:58pm Wednesday 6th August 2008

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Well, here's a turn up for the books.

I've been pursuing a story about a man with some supposedly troublesome dogs for weeks (or what seems like weeks) now, desperately trying to get in contact with the man himself, finding no phone number for him, unable even to confirm his name. It was becoming increasingly frustrating and rapidly turning into a very one-sided story. But yesterday, after visiting his home (with a little persuasion from our fearless chief reporter - I was none too keen to go, with the allegations about the animals living there still at the front of my mind) and leaving him a note when he didn't answer the door, lo and behold, he turned up at the office. In fact, he had a very different story to tell, clearing up an awful lot of misconception and filling out various half-formed bits of information, including the spelling of his name. Which was useful.

It was a trick I learned during my training in Newcastle. There's a story, which I suspect may have been largely exaggerated and somewhat spurious, about a man from Northumberland, who routinely visited Ireland, where he impersonated a priest (or it might have been a bishop - the details are a little hazy) and managed to dupe a number of friendly Irish folk. The story goes that he was given a lot of free meals, possibly received cash donations and even celebrated fraudulent masses. And he kept it up for years, until finally being caught out, at which point, on his return to his Northumberland home, he found himself at the centre of a media circus.

The story-hungry journos and photographers camped out day and night in front of his home, waiting for their quarry, but he never emerged. Finally, one of them suggested leaving a note for the man while they all went down the pub by way of a break in the waiting. This reporter - who, of course, worked for the local paper - told his venerable colleagues the note would simply tell the priest impersonator where they'd gone and that if he wanted to talk, to make a call to the pub. So off they went and once most people were fairly well lubricated, the fellow from the local paper quietly disappeared into the gents and even more quietly, climbed out the window. He then made a dash back to the priest impersonator's house - and got the interview.

What the note actually said was that it would be foolish to trust any of these big city bloodhounds from the national newspapers and he'd do far better to tell his friendly local paper the whole story, to get a better chance of a fair hearing.

While my own tale of successful note leaving isn't nearly as dramatic and the story won't exactly be earth-shattering, it just goes to show that a little ingenuity goes a long way - and it gives me hope for the future that my own "ratlike cunning" might just develop enough to pull off an equally impressive feat.