Why Scotland Yard put me and my child on a register

and Stath Lets Flats is to blame.

About a year ago, when my daughter was 11, she handed me her phone - which is a real piece of shit Nokia brick, pay-as-you-go, £14 from Argos, so crap she hardly bothers turning it on, yes I’m a parenting genius, no of course she hasn’t got any friends, not with a phone like that - and said someone called Scotland Yard was on the phone. And this person called Scotland Yard was apparently asking to speak to her mum.

As gags go, it was far-fetched, especially as only about five people had her number, but I went with it.

“Hello Scotland Yard!” I said, “Oh yes, Detective Inspector, who, great, what, yes, course you are mate.”

That all stopped quite quickly when I realised I was talking to a detective from Scotland Yard. And that I was in trouble. Apparently, a ‘child in distress’ had made a call to the emergency services from that phone the day before, and it had taken them a full 24 hours to track our location via the unregistered, non-contract, totally offline Nokia.

I swear you could hear the contempt in his voice at our primitive technology; my attempts to be an organic yummy mummy having inadvertently turned me into Stringer Bell. Just out here supplying burners to minors on the mean playgrounds of Kentish Town C of E.

I looked at my overgrown baby in sudden panic. There must be some mistake.

Had the child said anything on this call, I asked?

No, he said, but the child had been making noises that showed they were in distress, possibly being violently attacked, possibly making the call in secret, unable to speak - and so the police, having now located us were already very near my property and about to descend on us, going to surround us. So could I really, truly, vouch for this child’s welfare?

Yes, I said, yes! You spoke to her yourself, she’s absolutely fine! Nothing whatsoever has happened here and I was with her all day yesterday myself, we’re a single parent family, it’s just us here! We love each other!

And then I started thinking well, I would say all those things, wouldn’t I, if I was doing something terrible to my kid, and then it all started ploughing around my head and then - and then - then I wondered what had we actually been doing the day before.

And what we had actually been doing was watching millions, billions of episodes of Stath Lets Flats, which we’d never seen. It’s a comedy series made by Jamie Demetriou (and his sister Natasia Demetriou, and Robert Popper) about an inept estate agent who can’t even rent out a flat to someone willing to pay for it without getting into some absurd drama like, I don’t know, accidentally summoning Scotland Yard.

During this, my daughter’s phone had butt-dialled 999 without us noticing. And she’d been laughing so hard at Stath that she was beyond laughter, she was now wheezing, falling off the sofa in delight, and these sounds had been mistaken for her being murdered, and a SWAT team was coming to save her from the demented fictitious Cypriots.

After some further discussion I did manage to convince the cops that we were fine. But they said they couldn’t just let it go like that and so both the Nokia number and my own number, and all my details, and all my child’s details, would have to be logged onto some kind of register.

And on that police register we remain. I won’t lie - it doesn’t feel great!

But then yesterday, Jamie Demetriou posted something on Instagram about the show going to America, and I thought GOD I must tell him about this stupid thing that happened to us ages ago!

Because it just seems so funny now, in hindsight, and while he doesn’t follow me or know who I am, his Instagram messages are open, so off I went. Typing these long paragraphs to explain the situation above. Except I realised too late these long messages were bouncing back from the Instagram filters, too long to send, so I tried copying and pasting what I’d written and breaking it up into smaller sections, and this turned into a right old carry-on.

And then Insta said it was going to ban me from sending all these messages to someone who didn’t follow me back, and instead it would use just one of them as an INVITATION TO CHAT, and I looked at the one single message they had used to do this with - and it was from the middle of the conversation, it made no sense at all in isolation, but the rest of the messages had all now disappeared and - so I went to delete this one stupid message to Jamie, and give up altogether - but it said you can’t delete an INVITATION TO CHAT and so - fuck lord no -

And the thing is, also, that I’m an entertainment journalist and often interview actors and comedians for newspapers, so it would actually be quite normal for me to cross the path of someone famous like Jamie. Though it would probably be easier if my first attempt at contact didn’t look like this:

Because sending a celebrity a message like that is probably a good start to getting yourself put on a whole other register.

Well, it’s been a full 24 hours now. I still can’t delete that message. There’s been no response, why would there be, even though Stath would have replied to my INVITATION TO CHAT, that much I know.

So here we are.

My daughter is 13 now.

And she’s getting her dad’s spare iPhone for Christmas.