Nigel Farndale, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, relates the story of a friend who was paid a visit by the local constabulary.

His mother rang to tell him that he had left the barrel of a shotgun - only the barrel - out of the cabinet. He said he would pop over next day to put it back. Before he could, the police arrived at the house and said they had reason to believe that there was a gun on the premises that was not under lock and key. The only way they could have known this was by intercepting his call.

Why, Farndale asks, are the police monitoring his friend's every call? The unwritten implication is that the police have got better things to do with their time than sit and listen in to the telephone conversations of taxi firm owners in rural Nowheresville. Somehow though, I think things have moved on and there is no need for policemen to sit listening in to the minutiae of school runs in the sticks. I'm sure I read somewhere that software now exists that will automatically monitor telephone conversations for key words and phrases like "gun", "get the" and "shove it up Blair's bottom". So it's much more likely that every telephone conversation of every gun owner is being monitored by a computer, or worse, that every telephone conversation in the country is routinely checked.

Perhaps somebody braver than me would like to do a test: ring a pal, and tell him you'd like him to drop the Uzi round in the morning. If the police break the door down shortly afterwards then we know something's amiss. Any volunteers?