beckyc told me in the pub today that she had happened to be passing through the police station recently and they'd been interested to hear she lived below number 1A, and asked if she might happen to know what I was doing with tinfoil over my bedroom window. sonicdrift then explained to me that tinfoil-covered windows are apparently often a sign of someone growing cannabis; that and high electricity bills for the bright lights (which is what the tinfoil would be hiding from passers-by).

In fact, the tinfoil is there because I'm ludicrously light-sensitive when I sleep, and don't appreciate it getting light in my bedroom at 5am in the summer when I don't want to get up for another three hours. I've tried thick curtains, and they help, but enough light still comes in round the edges that I had to resort to tinfoil as well, and having done so I can now get a full night's sleep even at midsummer. But the hilarious thing is, I do also have high electricity bills, because my flat uses night storage heaters rather than conventional gas central heating. (Well, I have high electricity bills in winter, at least; it's all turned off at the moment.) So I guess that puts me smack (ahem) in the middle of the profile for cannabis-growers, which I find wildly amusing.

What's particularly amusing about this is that I can't stand cannabis. I've never actually smoked it, but I've once or twice been at parties where other people were smoking it, and I'm sensitive enough to the stuff that the trace quantities in the second-hand smoke were enough to affect me – and enough to convince me that I don't like its effect. I certainly wouldn't deliberately smoke it; that would surely be the same thing only even worse. Also I'd be completely incapable of growing the stuff, on the grounds that I have whatever the exact opposite is of green fingers, and can't be trusted with so much as a pot plant. (Er, as it were.)

I almost wish the police had been curious enough to come and actually ask me, so I could laugh at them in person. For the moment, though, I'm going to have to settle for laughing at them from a distance.