Town mouse on being scammed in the city

London is full of citizens with an eye to a making a quick buck at someone else’s expense, finds Clive

Town mouse; country life
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Has anyone seen Scott? He's the tubby man who came to our house on Saturday, offering to clean the windows. Busy fellow. He had a whole team of people in the street. Naturally, I'm not one to be taken in, so I told him to come back in an hour and then forgot about it. There he was again, just before his men were due to reach the Citizen's Advice Bureau on the corner.

Having produced the money, I could then only agree that it would be very convenient if he returned in a month's time. If I paid in advance, we wouldn't even need to be in. And so Scott and I walked to the cashpoint together, having what was to me an insightful conversation about the world of a window-cleaning entrepreneur.

Since then, strangely, our windows have not been cleaned. Nor, I suspect, have anyone else's. I've been trying to look on the £80 of which I'm now short as a charitable donation. In an attempt to recoup some of the money, I didn't lash out on a white loaf to make bread sauce that evening, but, instead, used some stale hotcross buns. Many of the greatest cuisines of the world are born out of the peasant need to economise. What chance of my bread sauce becoming a classic?

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Country Life
Country Life

Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.

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