The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

The newspaper

My mom was depressed. Unfortunately, she was determined to take her own life. She tried overdosing on tablets, which failed. Her ideal plan was to jump off a high building (but not before putting herself in bags so as not to make a mess for others).

We went on holiday to Cyprus. It was the most beautiful place I've ever been. Golden beaches that stretched on for miles. Turquiose sea. It was a shame my mom was suffering from depression; she spent most of the holiday in the hotel room, unwilling to come out. Guilt was eating her from the inside. Guilt. She had no way to make it stop.

There was a shop in the hotel. It sold nappies, toothpaste, tampons, and other essentials people might have forgotten. One day I went to the shop to find something to read. Outside the shop were newspapers: Le Monde, Die Welt, US Today, The Times. I picked up The Times. There was no one around. There must have been someone inside running the shop but they were out of sight. I walked off with the newspaper without paying for it.

I had no desire to go to prison. I did not want to end up forced to do the 'Greek pita', where two Greek men act as the pita bread and I'm in the middle as the filling.

Thanfully I never went to prison because no one saw me stealing the newspaper.

This experience set off something inside me. All my life I'd been paying for things with hard-earned money and now I could get things for free!

The wallet

The next day, my family and I went on a walk. [where?]

We stopped in a tourist shop. The shop sold expensive coasters, dreamcatchers, wind chimes, soaps, and candles.

As I was wandering around the shop, I saw a pile of leather wallets. I needed a new wallet because my wallet was falling apart. So I snuck one of the wallets into my pocket, with my mom standing opposite me.

I don't know what I was thinking. I could have been caught in so many ways.

Did I care that stealing is immoral? No, I didn't care. I didn't care about the effect of my stealing on the shop or the shop's owner. All I cared about was me and my chance for a free wallet.

I walked out of the store and the alarm went off: WOO WOO WOO WOO. I turned and looked over at the staff, like a rabbit caught in car headlights. But the two store assistants — two young women, perhaps working there as a summer job — just smiled at me sympathetically. Tourists must have been accidentally setting the alarm off all the time (though presumably not with actual stolen goods from the store).

I went back inside and returned the wallet. Only then did I notice what was inside: a black security tag. It had set off the alarm

"Did you try to steal a wallet just now?" said my mom, when I was outside.

"Uhhhh... yeah," I said.

"I thought I saw you. But I wasn't sure."

"Wait, what?" said my brother. "Paul tried to steal a wallet?"

I felt my face turning red.

"Paul, did you try to steal a wallet?" said my dad.

"Well, I just wanted it, so..."

He shook his head. "What were you thinking? They could have called the police."

"But it's not fair, the wallet was like 20 euros. The prices were so expensive there. They're ripping people off."

My family were appalled.

My second shoplifting attempt had been a failure. My mom had seen me, the store alarm had sounded, and I didn't even have anything to show for it. Plus I'd made the mistake of stealing an empty wallet instead of a wallet filled with money. If you're going to steal a wallet, at least steal a rich man's wallet and not an empty one.

WHSmith

When I returned to the UK, the next thing I stole was a book from WHSmith. The book was massive, and cost about £10, so I’d never have bought it. There was only one old lady on the till and she was busy with customers. I spent half an hour seemingly absorbed in biros, ten for £1.99 while building up my courage to walk out the shop with the book.

Eventually, I'd built up enough courage and I walked out of the store with the book. I walked briskly home. I was certain that security men from WHSmith were secretly following me home to find out where I lived. I skirted my council estate’s CCTV cameras, imagining the police were trying to find me. When I got closer to my house, I thought it was just a matter of moments before two burly security guards jumped me and

But I got home safely. Still, for the next few days, I waited for a letter in the post saying I had to go to court, or for a policeman to knock on the door and arrest me.

But nothing happened. No one had followed me from WHSmiths. No one knew I had stolen that book.

So I carried on shoplifting.

That early success made me realise how easy shoplifting was, and so it escalated. I regularly drove to shopping centres just to steal. I'd shoplift a book from WHSmith, dump it in my car, then steal clothes from H&M. Rinse and repeat. One Christmas my family were touched by the expensive presents I’d got them, blissfully unaware I hadn’t paid for anything. All the presents were stolen.

I wasn't stealing for a thrill. I wasn't stealing because I enjoyed it. I was stealing to save money. My job was only part-time and close to minimum wage. A global recession had dashed my hopes of getting a better job. And a man who had far more money than I did was charging me £360 a month just so I could live in a room in his house. I was from the No Hope Generation, a generation of adults who graduated university at precisely the time when there were no jobs to go into.

Marks and Sucker

WHSmith is easy to steal from, and so is Marks and Spencer. There are no security tags on the clothes in Marks and Spencer, for instance, and the changing rooms are usually unstaffed. This means you can take clothes into changing rooms, put them on under your own, and then walk out of the shop. Which is what I frequently did.

Also, I’ve heard there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but at M&S you can get all the free sandwiches you want - if you shoplift them, that is.

Despite their lax security, M&S almost caught me. I wanted to steal a clock, of all things. I wanted a clock for my bedroom so I went to M&S and found one. Then, right there in the store, I put the clock into a carrier bag. As I was heading for the exit, I saw several security guards striding in the same direction, cutting off my escape. They'd 'clocked' that I was a thief.

I didn't run, though. All I'd done so far was put a clock in a bag, which wasn't a crime. So I simply turned around and returned the clock to the shelf.

When I did leave the store, a guard followed me and glanced at the empty carrier bag I was carrying. He seemed disappointed that my bag was empty. He slouched off back to the store.

Tesco

One day, I went grocery shopping in Tesco. When I got to the meat section, I took a couple of trays of chicken and snuck them into my reusable shopping bag.

I went around the rest of the supermarket, putting stuff into my trolley, trying to look normal, like an ordinary shopper instead of a shoplifter.

I got to the self-service checkout. Now all I had to do was pay for my stuff, put it in the bag on top of the chicken, and get out.

But a woman who worked there said, "Here, let me help you."

Then she took my carrier bag. She wanted to be helpful by bagging my groceries for me. But when she looked inside my bag, she saw the two packets of chicken I'd put in there earlier.

She stared at the chicken. Then she looked at me for an explanation.

"I paid for those," I lied. "I came in earlier and paid for them."

"Do you have the receipt?" she said.

"No, I must have lost it," I said, lying again. There was no receipt because I had never paid for them.

She frowned. "Just wait here a minute," she said. Then she went over to the store's security guard, a bored man who was standing over by the wall. The woman was pointing at me and saying things. The security guard was looking at me.

Finally, the woman came back.

"That's fine," she said. And she helped me bag the rest of my groceries.

For some reason, they let me go. I was lucky that day.

My mom's suicide

During this time, my mom was still suicidal. She tried overdosing twice, once on a mix of her medications and again with 90 paracetamol tablets. She was sectioned (imprisoned in a mental health hospital for her own safety).

One day, while out of the mental health hospital, she took a bus to Birmingham City Centre. It was a Sunday afternoon. When the bus reached the city centre, she got off the bus and walked to a multi-storey car park. She climbed the stairs to the top floor of the car park and then climbed up onto the wall. Below was a five-storey drop. I don't know what my mom was feeling in those moments. Fear? Despair? Or perhaps hope? Hope that her pain would finally be over.

She jumped from the top floor of the car park. Onlookers were horrified. Paramedics were called. Police put up a tent around my mom's body and cordoned off the street.

For my mom, it was finally over. She was at peace.

I didn't feel sad. I know I should have been sad about my mom's death. She was a good mom and she took care of me and my siblings. But our childhoods hadn't been the best. My dad worked full-time, leaving my mom at home by herself to look after four children. Money was often tight. My mom was convinced my dad was cheating on her behind her back and was going to leave her. All these issues bubbled up inside her and came out in my mom yelling at my dad. At its worst, my mom would scream and shout at my dad in front of me and my siblings. When my dad wasn't at home, my mom would try to turn us, her children, against our dad by saying things like, "Your dad is a bad person". My dad was out so often working that he had no chance to defend himself. My sister completely internalised my mom's resentment towards my dad, and would scream and shout at him too.

But now my mom was gone, I felt free.

Also, I thought girls would fancy me now I had a dead mom. Girls love that sort of stuff, I reckoned: personal tragedy, having a dead parent.

O Canada! The land of free things

I moved to Canada on a working holiday visa. And I continued shoplifting. Almost every day I'd cycle downtown and steal from exotic-sounding stores: De Serres, La Baie, Les Aisles.

How did I steal? Usually, I’d go to a blind spot (a place not watched by cameras), and when I was alone, I’d drop stuff into a carrier bag I'd brought with me. Yep, a simple plastic carrier bag was my best tool. Then I'd either walk out or pay for something minor, so as not to look suspicious.

The art of the steal

This strategy worked for small items, but what about larger stuff? Well, I often walked out of art stores carrying 16x20 inch canvases. I just walked out the store. Right past the cashier. Incredible. I guess the employees hardly blinked when I walked out the store, because it’s too obvious. Perhaps they thought no one could be that stupid, and were looking for shoplifters stuffing things in their pockets instead. To be fair though, I did wait until the cashiers were distracted with customers. I’m not entirely stupid.

I used the art supplies to run painting sessions at my hostel. The hostel owner, Luc, didn't care though. The only thing he cared about was his precious hostel. When he saw the impromptu painting sessions, he practically shat himself with glee. Here was an activity for guests to enjoy and he didn't have to pay a dime.

The most expensive thing I ever stole

Shoplifting was also a neat way of making money. My friends would tell me what they wanted, and I’d steal it for them, for a price. I was part-Fagin, part Argos catalogue.

One friend wanted a pair of $260 pair of Ray-Bans and offered me $50 if I could steal them. I found a pair in a department store. The glasses were security tagged, and it took me ten minutes to wiggle the tag off. Wiggle wiggle wiggle, as I inched the tag inched down the temple. I must have looked suspicious on the CCTV, but I guess no one was watching. The sunglasses department wasn't even staffed.

As I walked out of the store, my muscles were tensed, anticipating security would stop me. But no one did. This was typical of shoplifting - ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’d get away scot-free.

The terminator

I've written about this in more detail here.

My friend asked if I could steal a sleeping bag for him. He'd told me he would give me half the cost of the sleeping bag if I could get it. I saw this as an opportunity to make money so I cycled my shit bike all the way over to the shop he wanted the sleeping bag from, Canadian Tire.

I went into the shop. It was a big hardware store like B&Q. I found the sleeping bag down one of the massive aisles. Then, when no one was looking, I stuffed it into a carrier bag I’d brought with me. So far, so good. No one had seen me and now I just needed to walk out of the store and make a getaway.

But to leave the store, I had to walk past a cashier. When I tried to do this, this cashier said, "Excuse me, what's that in your bag?"

"It's a sleeping bag," I said. For fuck sake, brain. "I paid for it earlier."

"Do you have the receipt?"

"Ah, no, I must have left it in my car," I said, as I smiled and shrugged.

"I'll have to scan the label. Don't worry, it'll just take a moment."

She scanned the tag on the sleeping bag. Something came up on her screen that made her frown. "It says here the bag is still unsold. Sorry, can you wait here a minute?"

The cashier called a security guard over. The guard then led me to his office and told me to wait outside while he checked the CCTV footage. His office, I noticed, was conveniently located right next to the store's exit.

So instead of waiting, I simply walked out of the store. I walked calmly to my bike, unlocked it, and started to cycle off. But when I glanced back, I saw the security guard sprinting right behind me! He was running after me like the T-1000 or like Susan Boyle chasing an ice-cream van. Thankfully my bike was faster and I escaped. Praise be to Thomas F. Bicycle, inventor of the bike!

On the way home I avoided the main streets because I imagined the police were looking out for me with the description of a “thin pale nervous man on a shit bike”. In reality, I think the security guard probably went back to reading Playboy and eating doughnuts instead of calling the police. Still, I was so nervous I crashed my bike into a wall on the way back, though thankfully only my pride was hurt.

When I finally got back to the hostel, I was badly shaken. I had to sit down for an hour to calm down.

My friend Declan noted how pale I looked. "You should stop shoplifting," he said. "Maybe this time was a warning. A warning you should stop now while you're still ahead."

"Shut up, you Irish bastard," I said. Or would have said if I hadn't still been in shock.

But if it was a warning then I didn't pay any attention to it. I should have, though. Then the events that followed would never have happened.

Simons says: You’re nicked

I should have heeded his warning because the police were involved the next time I got caught. I was leaving a clothing store called Simons carrying unpaid three t-shirts when a voice behind me said, "Excuse me".

I turned and saw a beefy security guard behind me. Then I noticed several other plain-clothes security staff approaching me from different directions of the street, like agents from the Matrix. I was surrounded.

"Can you come back to the store," said the beefy security guard. It wasn't a question.

I ran away, and the guards chased me all over Montreal, including through people's back gardens and washing lines, until I finally got away by climbing over a chain-link fence and heroically jumping onto a moving train. And as the train pulled away to another city, I waved the stolen t-shirts at the cursing, panting guards.

I didn't do any of that. Instead, I meekly went back into the store with the guards. They led me to a white, windowless room and left me there. One guard stayed in the room with me to make sure I didn't try to escape somehow. I don't know how they thought I was going to escape. Maybe they thought I was going to walk through the wall by vibrating my molecules at the same frequency as air, like the Flash. (I can't do that, by the way.)

The police took ages, about two hours. I guess they had more serious crimes to attend to first, like literally anything else. Meanwhile, a loss prevention officer sat across the table, trying not to make awkward eye contact with me.

When the police finally arrived, they basically just let me go because I’d had no prior convictions. The police made no record of the event, thus leaving my criminal record untarnished. But Simons did send me a letter threatening to press charges unless I gave them $450. I shit myself and paid.

For a few dollar stores more

You’d think an encounter with Canada’s law enforcement would’ve put me off shoplifting for good. But nope – I was a tenacious chap. I figured my mistake had been to target stores with a lot of security. From now on I was only going to target small stores, like dollar stores. No one gets caught shoplifting at the dollar store.

Except me. I got caught shoplifting at a dollar store. I was stuffing five packets of almonds in a bag - $2 each - when I noticed a woman was watching me. I should have put the nuts back, but I thought I deserve these almonds because I was having a shitty day.

As I walked out of the store, a voice behind me said, “Can you come back inside sir?” I turned around, and behind me was the same woman who had watched me shoplift. It turned out she was an undercover loss prevention officer.

I could have run away, but instead, I obediently followed her into the store’s holding room. She called the cops, and then I spent a torturous hour waiting in the room with her and another security guard.

The two women were surprisingly touchy with each other. I began to suspect they were a couple. It was just the kind of weird thing that happened to me in Canada: here I was, trapped in a room with two lesbian security guards. It was like the plot of a bad porn movie.

Nothing sexual happened in that room though, or at least, not while I was there, because suddenly there was a loud siren noise from behind the door, as if from a police car. But it couldn’t have been a police car, because we were underground, in the middle of a shopping mall. It turned out the police had arrived and they had a device that made the sound of a siren that they used to scare criminals with. It was bizarre.

Two cops walked in and looked around the room. I was alone in there by this point. When they saw me, they were unsure if I was the shoplifter. They were probably expecting a teenager or a black man.

“I’m the shoplifter,” I said helpfully.

One cop said, “Can you stand up for me? Ok, now turn around. Put your hands behind your back." He had a friendly vibe.

So I put my hands behind my back and he handcuffed me. This was new. I'd never been handcuffed before, not even to a bed by a kinky prostitute.

One of the policemen searched my bag and pockets. Thank god I hadn't stolen anything else yet that day. Instead, all he found was my artbook which had my drawings of naked women. The two cops flicked through the pages and whistled appreciatively.

"What's this?" one of them asked, pointing to a drawing of a woman with massive boobs.

"It's my art book," I said. I wanted to be as helpful and cooperative as possible. "I go to an art class. There are naked women there." I'm not sure they needed to know that in such detail. But maybe they wanted to go to the art class too?

One of the policemen took my wallet out of my pocket and looked through it. He pulled out a small tab of LSD.

The whole atmosphere in the room changed. The cop got mad. "What's this?" he said.

"It's a drug. I bought it from a friend."

The cop went into a raging fit against me. “You’re in very serious trouble and it’s certainly not in your best interests to be lying,” he shouted.

In a rare moment of clarity for me, I realised what had happened. This French Canadian cop, English not being his first language. had misheard me and thought I had said, "I’m holding it for a friend". He thought I was trying to lie my way out of the situation.

I calmly said, "No, no, you misheard me. I said, I bought it from a friend. The drug is mine."

This defused his anger a bit. His partner, who must have been the good cop of this good-cop-bad-cop partnership, took me to the bathroom and there, he made me watch as he flushed the drug down the toilet. It was the best thing he could have done because he flushed away the evidence.

“This is what you should do with drugs,” he said. In my head, silently, I thanked him.

But my ordeal wasn't over yet. They led me out into the store in handcuffs. Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” was playing over the store's stereo system. I found this appropriate because it’s a song in Layer Cake, a crime film. I imagined my life was a film, and this was the final scene - the cops leading me out in handcuffs. It would be in slow-motion and come just before the epilogue, explaining that I was serving a life sentence in jail.

The police led me through the mall, past curious shoppers. I think the idea was to humiliate me.

Finally we were outside. The cops put me in the back of their police car. They were really giving me all their special services today, even getting to sit in a police car and everything. Then they entered my details into a computer. Then – instead of letting me go with a cheeky wink – they said I’d have to attend a court hearing. The two cops actually seemed apologetic about this, maybe because I'd been cooperative and they liked me.

"Sorry, but Dollarama has a policy of always prosecuting shoplifters," one cop explained.

Meanwhile, the two lesbian security guards were standing next to the car and looking disgusted at me through the window.

Eventually, I was let go and I made my way back to the hostel, in fear and shame.

O Canada, please don't kick me out

I spent the next weeks worrying about the court hearing. My gut feeling was I’d get a light penalty, but other times I feared I’d be kicked out of Canada. So again I shit myself (for a shoplifter, I sure did shit myself a lot – I should have stolen some adult diapers) and got a lawyer.

The court day came, but my name wasn’t on the docket, because they'd forgiven me and dropped the charges! By the way, I’d paid the lawyer $500 just to find this out. It had probably taken him no more than half an hour, plus I could have done it myself. So who are the real thieves, really? Apart from me, obviously.

Conclusion

I've stopped stealing now. You could say I've retired. Having been caught four times, I’m probably not very good at it either.