Dear reader, I married her

Nothing says I Love You on Valentine's Day quite as much as a Smiths/Morrissey song but I'm torn between Girlfriend in a Coma and You're The One For Me Fatty.
I don't know what the fuss is about. As they say, if you lock your wife and your dog in a shed for an hour, guess which one is happier to see you when you open the door.
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OK officer, it's a fair cop. Come and slip the cuffs on and load me into the back of the Black Maria, I'm guilty.
You see, at the Ilford CID Christmas party of 1983 we ended up at the Red Lion and I'm pretty sure I put into the whipround that saw several of our local Regan and Carter lookalikes get served with a large Bell's or two.
In return I was obviously hoping that at my twice weekly police calls for the Ilford Recorder I would be able to ask one or two detectives a question here or there and get more than the standard two word response.
If only it had stayed there, maybe I would only be looking at community service. But I couldn't stop. Every Thursday I'd pick up a pile of newly published papers and drive round to the various fire stations on my beat and hand out free copies so they could read my latest Folk Focus column or look through the classifieds to buy a second hand Cortina from the Murder Mile showrooms of Seven Kings High Road.
In return I'd get a cup of tea and a Lincoln biscuit, paid for no doubt by honest GLC ratepayers. There's a law against that you know. At least there is now that they've dusted off the 1906 Bribery Act.
There's other TICs too. I occasionally bought a pint for local press officers from Redbridge Council, mainly the two old blokes who had been there when 'all this was fields' but more so when a newly graduated young lady joined them.
In fact I not only bought her a white wine spritzer at The Angel, and then claim it on expenses, I bought her several more at The Warren Wood and, in a desperate quest to get the inside track on the Fairlop Waters Planning Sub-Committee decisions ahead of deadline, I even had sex with her. That was a bit harder to put on expenses I must admit.
To her credit, she never gave me any inside information on council matters. And 26 years later we're married with two teenage children and a labrador. She still doesn't give me any decent stories but perhaps that's because we don't have sex as often either.
Naturally I married her in order that, decades later, if plod called round at 6am she wouldn't have to testify against me. It's an extreme measure, I grant you, but it's always best to plan ahead.
As a journalist and a tabloid one, and a former Sun man, I'm appalled at the arrests of several of my former colleagues including a couple of good mates this week.
But I'm not going to beat my chest about it like Richard Littlejohn and Trevor Kavanagh did, so brilliantly in the Mail and Sun this week.
And there's a simple reason for that. No one gives a shit if journalists get arrested. We can bleat on as much as we like about civil liberties and freedom of speech but that just makes readers turn round and say 'you were not so bothered when the police shot a Brazilian bloke on the Tube' or any other number of rights' abuses gleefully reported in the tabloids.
Both Trevor and Richard's pieces were, I suspect, written more for the benefit of their comrades in the industry - what are known colloquially as tabloid scum - rather than the general populace.
One look at the comments section under their stories quickly tells you that.
There is a simple fact. Journalists have been buying drinks for coppers for hundreds of years. Many of those that did it on local papers now work for organisations like the BBC and The Guardian.
Senior executives on newspapers have gone further. In return for considerable favours they have paid considerable amounts. I suppose in the eyes of the law, a few pints at the Red Lion for a detective constable is no different to a fully paid weekend in a spa for a chief constable.
But there is a world of difference. And there's a world of difference in those executives invited to present themselves at their local nick and a van full of anti-terrorist officers taken off other duties to burst into the house of a 67-year-old Fleet Street legend who helped literally scores of us when we started our Fleet Street careers, going through his draws, looking under his floorboards and searching his attic.
As I said, there are a lot of decent reporters on broadsheets and broadcast who have, at some time, bought a drink for a public servant, not to mention nicking a family photograph by pushing a coathanger through a letterbox.
I could name names but then I'm not a dirty little grass like Will Lewis or Simon Greenberg, dobbing on former mates to save their own skins. Though I doubt it will save their reputations. Already hated by the public, they are now universally hated by journalists too. Nice going boys. Did they teach you that at Harvard?
As they should say on Crimewatch, don't have nightmares - we're only tabloid scum. Evening all...Solly