I never intended to be a copper, writes Mike Pannett. When I left school at 16 I had top honours in two subjects: Girls and motorbikes. While my mates went on to college or took up apprenticeships, I settled for the first job I could get - working on a farm.
It was a small place - 150 acres. I'd been helping out there since I was about 12, forking bales of hay into dusty hot dutch barns, taty-picking and sweeping down the yard on a Saturday morning.
Before health and safety got its teeth into rural life, I would ride back to the farm balanced precariously on top of the trailer load of hay, lashed down with well worn rope, smoking. If I was very good, the farmer would let me take the wheel of the tractor when we were out in the fields.
Apart from girls and bikes, I had one other passion in those days: York City FC. We're talking here about the old Second Division, when the Man Uniteds, Aston Villas and Sunderlands visited Bootham Crescent.
Even at 40p, the admission was a bit steep for a farm labourer doing a man's job for a boy's wage, but I soon realised that some of the spectators around me were getting to watch the match for nowt. They served in the local TA, and their home base was the Lumley Barracks, which overlooked the ground.
Several years in the Terriers made a man of me, got me perched on the barrack roof to view a lot of games free of charge, and had me thinking about careers. How I wound up in the Metropolitan Police - and how I got back to God's Own Country 10 years later - is a long story, and will be the subject of a later book. For now, I've enough tales from North Yorkshire to fill several volumes.
From one day to the next, you never know whether you're going to be chasing stolen cars, rescuing flood victims or going off in pursuit of mythical beasts that roam the countryside.
Take a cold January night a few years ago, for example. I was sitting in a lay-by having a drink from my Thermos when the boy racers shot past, doing 80 in a stolen Golf. I gave chase, and soon had a Traffic car involved, plus an Armed Response Vehicle which was in the area.
As my speed hit 105, I learned that reinforcements from York were setting up a road-block. Disaster almost struck when we got to the outskirts. We arranged to have a "stinger" rolled out across the road but could only watch as the runaways skirted round it on the grass verge and one of the pursuing cars ploughed right through it, ripping their tyres to shreds.
We got the car thieves in the end, but I left my fellow officers do the explaining. I was off on another call. Twenty minutes after the drama of that high-speed chase I was on my hands and knees, crawling across a snowbound fourteenth green on Ganton Golf Course. A woman had rung in, insisting she'd seen the Ryedale Panther, the notorious "big cat" that supposedly stalks the fields, always just far enough away to avoid a positive ID, and always in the dark.
This time, I was told, there were prints, huge prints, enormous, outlandish prints, perfectly preserved in snow that had fallen a day or two previously. So there I was, on all fours, investigating. All I lacked was a deer-stalker hat and a magnifying glass. When it came on to snow again, heavily, obscuring even my footprints - well, I hope nobody was passing by. God knows what they would have made of me, standing there in full uniform, laughing and shaking my head. The mystery of the panther remains unsolved.
Sometimes laughter is the only response. We know that there's nowt so strange as folk - but put alcohol into the mix and you get some very odd behaviour indeed.
It was a hot August night and there was a rumpus outside a pub in town. Could I attend? I had no choice: The only other officers on duty were dealing with a dust-up in Pickering. Just my luck, then, to have to arrest a bear of a man wearing a huge sombrero and sporting a bandolier full of shotgun cartridges across his naked torso. Well, someone has to do it, I thought, and waded in. I'd no sooner got him under control than I was attacked by a large lady wearing pink bunny ears and waving a silver wand. By the time I'd worked out that this was his stag night, her hen night, and tomorrow would be their wedding, I had the pair of them banged up in the cells for public order offences. And the best man too.
It was their good fortune to meet a copper who has a sense of humour and a bit of common sense. They weren't out-and-out criminals. They'd just had too much pop and had over-reacted to aggressive behaviour by other people. By the time I'd got them sobered up, processed and released it was six o'clock and their wedding was eight hours away.
As I crawled into my bed for a few hours' sleep I asked myself why I hadn't stuck to farming. That afternoon I stood outside the church and watched them - her with a fat lip, him with a black eye, the best man wearing a sling - lining up for the photographs. And I knew the answer.
Having served nearly 20 years in the police and starred in BBC's
Country Cops, Mike was inspired to write about his adventures in the North Yorks force. His new book,
You're Coming With Me Lad - tales of a Yorkshire Bobby, is published by Hodder and Stoughton, priced £12.99
Win copies of Mike's new book
Farmers Weekly has six copies of You're Coming With Me Lad to give away. We want you to write us a limerick starting with the line: There once was a rural bobby
Your limerick can be serious or funny and doesn't have to be related to Mike or his books
The senders of the six that we like best will each win a book.
Email them to fwfarmlife@rbi.co.uk, post them on our website forums at www.fwi.co.uk/limerick or send them to Farmlife limerick competition, Farmers Weekly, Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey, SM2 5AS. Entries must be received by Friday, 7 August 2009.
Read Mike's previous article for FWi here.