There are times in life when one must stop, take stock, and wonder if civilisation has, quite simply, had its day. That moment arrived for me this week in the form of a gentleman – and I use the term in its loosest, most elasticated sense – by the name of Richard Cove. A man who, rather than taking up cross-stitch, gardening, or any one of a thousand other harmless hobbies available to the middle-aged male, decided instead to devote his energies to becoming Britain’s most pungent prankster: a 101 nuisance caller with a particular penchant for feet.
Not content with phoning Sussex Police under his own dubious identity, Mr Cove – a man whose very surname sounds like it should come with a warning label – apparently adopted the persona of a lonely elderly lady. “Hello dear,” I imagine him cooing down the line like a Poundland Thora Hird, “I just wanted to report a suspicious smell. It’s coming from… my cheesy feet.” And with that, society cracked a little further.
Let us not skim over the detail here. This man wasn’t merely harassing emergency services – that old chestnut’s been roasted before. No, he was curating conversations, puppeteering the overstretched call handlers into saying words like “smelly feet” and “cheesy toes,” presumably while taking notes and murmuring “yes, yes, that’s the stuff.” It’s like Proust’s madeleine, only much, much worse.
We now live in a land where trained professionals, presumably with degrees, mortgages, and people depending on them, are being manipulated into erotically charged dialogues about fungal extremities – by a man who thinks the highest use of public resources is indulging his phalangeal fantasies. One wonders if Mr Cove ever sat through a Shakespeare play and thought, You know what this needs? Feet talk.
There is, of course, something tragically British about all of this. Only in this soggy archipelago could someone weaponise mild-mannered perversion with such precision. He didn’t scream, didn’t threaten, didn’t wave a pitchfork – he simply pestered like a damp sock left in a shoe, always there, always squelching, always faintly cheesy.
Somewhere in the Old Testament, perhaps wedged between Leviticus and Ezekiel, there ought to be a commandment: Thou shalt not impersonate widowed pensioners to coax police dispatchers into fetishistic foot-speak. If there isn’t, I’m writing to the Bishop.
But what fascinates me most is not just the act, grotesque though it may be, but the commitment. The artistry. This wasn’t a one-off drunken wheeze. This was a campaign. A strategy. The man had a script. He had goals. Possibly even a spreadsheet. We talk of a lost generation, of young men without purpose – but Richard Cove found his calling. Like a warped Odysseus, he set sail for the land of Telephonic Toes, and by God, he got there.
And yet, despite the comic horror, I find myself grudgingly intrigued. What does it say about modern Britain that this was even possible? That a man could dial emergency services repeatedly to discuss imaginary bunions without anyone sending round a vicar, or at the very least, a podiatrist with a taser? We’ve created a world so utterly bureaucratic, so dependent on polite protocols and digital switchboards, that even our deviants have started to sound like characters from Keeping Up Appearances.
In the end, Richard Cove was caught – though I doubt they used a sniffer dog. And now I picture him standing in the dock, eyes downcast, as the judge reads out a list of charges involving deception, nuisance calls, and the phrase “fungal hallucination.” I hope the magistrate wore sandals, just for the irony.
Let this be a lesson, dear reader: not all perversion comes wrapped in a leather trench coat or prowling the internet at 3am. Sometimes it arrives via your local police switchboard, pretending to be a widow with a wiffy slipper.
And if that doesn’t convince you the end is nigh, I don’t know what will.
The delicious aroma of coffee might help me get over this post, so why not Buy Me a Coffee
Wording 