DON’T CALL 999 AND PUT YOUR FOOT IN IT!

ing most of the calls.” Many of the calls led to clinicians responding and sometimes ambulances were even dispatched.

“MY boyfriend won’t kiss me!” ­ this is just one of the weirdest 999 calls revealed by police who urge a sensible use of the emergency number as people use it to discover train times and dentists’ contact details. Last year a woman even called 999 because she’d been refused entry to a nightclub for being ‘past it’. Good grief!

Or how about a woman complaining that she’d been sent three saveloy and chips from the chip shop instead of one? Or a man asking for the time, and another complaining about a packet of biscuits being out of date?

But top prize goes to the man who admitted making hundreds of nuisance calls to the NHS 111 line in order to indulge a ‘sexual foot fetish’. The offender from Worthing, West Sussex, made over 1,000 calls, costing the NHS £21,000.

Pretending to be an elderly woman and using ‘false personal details, false telephone numbers and false ailments’, he’d ask call handlers about their feet according to Sussex Police who stated he “had a sexual foot fetish which he indulged dur­

Heck, if crime writers like myself came up with motives as weak as these for calling out the cops or calling the NHS 111 line in our thrillers, we’d be nicked for wasting readers’ time...

And that’d be a fair cop!

Now, tourists may think exorbitant London prices are daylight robbery, but police see things differently. A woman called 999 because she was outraged that a clown was selling balloons for £5 each, which was ‘much more than other clowns were charging’. She was one of the 10 worst offenders for time­wasting revealed by the Metropolitan Police in an urgent appeal not to make unnecessary calls.

Others to call 999 in London included people complaining about being served a cold kebab, being kept awake by noisy foxes and asking where to get a bacon sandwich. One of my favourites has to be the woman who said there were ‘men’ in her house trying to take her away. The ‘men’ were in fact police officers who had come to arrest her!

Avon and Somerset Police received a call from someone enquiring about their application to Avon the cosmetics company. They also received a call from a man who reported criminal damage had been done to his noodles, another claiming a badger was chasing him, and yet another to say a seagull had stolen and eaten his sandwich.

Police Scotland’s emergency call handlers were amazed when a woman reported the theft of her snowman. Other calls included a request to check a woman’s height, another reported a ‘dirty look’ from a neighbour and a woman asked for help with a large spider in her home.

You couldn’t make all this up, could you? Well, let’s finish where we began: on a low note, and the poster recently seen in a maternity ward. “The first three minutes of life are the most dangerous,” it read. Underneath someone had scribbled: “The last three can be pretty dodgy too.”

Nora Johnson’s 11 critically acclaimed psychological crime thrillers (www.norajohnson.net) all available online including eBooks (€0.99; £0.99), Apple Books, audiobooks, paperbacks at Amazon etc. Profits to Cudeca cancer charity.