Tim Dowling: Do I look like a man who would buy stolen wine?

Tim Dowling: Do I look like a man who would buy stolen wine? As I attempt garden repairs between downpours, I wonder why I was targeted as a likely purchaser of shoplifted goods I ’m walking to the station in driving rain, under the protection of a £12 umbrella I bought at a newsagent the day before – during a previous rainstorm – which is already turning up on one side. My head is down, and I do not immediately see the young man approaching from the other direction, arms full, who stops in my path. “D’ya wanna buy one?” he says, holding out one of three bottles of white wine he has clearly just shoplifted. Or maybe they’re his. My cynical assumption rests entirely on the basis that he’s so keen to get rid of the bottles that he’s approaching strangers in the middle of a downpour. “No thank you,” I say, but still: I feel seen. The pavement was crowded, and he picked me. I imagine him sprinting from the shop, thinking: what possessed me to steal white wine? How am I going to unload all this at 11am on a wet Wednesday? But look! Here comes a likely prospect now! And it’s true that even as the words “no thank you” were forming on my lips, I was scrutinising the label on the bottle to see if it might be my sort of thing. I’m not claiming to be insulted by the quality of the white wine on offer. Let’s just say we both made unflattering assumptions that morning. I suppose, in his case, he was going by the umbrella. When I get home that afternoon the rain has stopped, and I face an unpleasant chore: the ivy climbing the garden wall has pulled the trellis on top of it to bits, and I need to cut and clear away all the greenery and replace three trellis sections. I bought all the stuff to do it two weeks ago, but it has rained every day since. It’s also supposed to rain tomorrow – and forever thereafter – so this is my only window. The ivy vines are as thick as a tree in places, threaded through with tough creepers, thorny rose suckers and pieces of old trellis. I rotate betw...