Free Anything to Declare? by Jon Frost

He would tear up official paperwork if it was written in blue ink rather than black and banned officers from bringing in any food that smelled too much. We knew he had to go when we realized he was so bad that he’d even give Customs officers a bad name.
    Our get-rid offensive started simply but effectively. We’d had brand-new lockers delivered. Richard had spent quite a lot of departmental money on them. Compared to what we’d had before – which were like school gym lockers – these were state of the art. But within a few days, as is always the way, officers started individualizing their own lockers with name tags, pictures and small stickers. Richard went ballistic. He got the poor old office manager to remove all the stickers and tags while he himself pinned up an official notice that contained enough exclamation marks to crucify Christ: ‘PLEASE NOTE!! – The placing of name tags or stickers on the official lockers is banned!! It will be seen as defacing official government property!! The perpetrators will be reprimanded!!’
    All through the day and night, officers made themselves busy bringing stuff from home, scrounging stuff from the airlines and airport shops, etc. The following morning, Richard arrived to witness the handiwork of myself and all my colleagues: every single locker had disappeared – hidden under thousands of tags, stickers, pictures, photos and signs of every kind. Two lockers were even fully wrapped in Christmas paper with giant ribbons and bows. It was the first of many pranks. Richard was on his way within the month but he did have the final say. He gave all the officers that worked under him the lowest possible ratings on their annual reports (black marks that could never be removed, affected your promotion chances and prevented a pay rise). Thanks, Dick.
    I’d become justly proud of the officers of HM Customs. It was as rare as rocking-horse doo to find a genuine ‘bad un’. But we had one at the airport called Chaz. He was my reporting officer for a short while and I knew that the senior officers hoped that I’d lose my temper and wipe his clock clean. He was also, among others things, a meat burglar.
    We were very hot on the importation of all food types, especially meat, with its potential for disease. Ireland was a major source country for the bulk of meat seizures. The Irish were very proud of their produce and rightly so, but the meat ban covered all countries and all meats from dried chimpanzee in a Nigerian suitcase (not an unusual find) to a pound of sausages in a carrier bag from the Emerald Isle. And to stop us seizing their purchases, passengers sometimes even ate their meat, raw, right in front of us. Which wasn’t too bad for the passenger if it was a fillet steak but it was quite a sight if it was three pounds of black pudding. We tended to just stand back out of curiosity and see what would happen. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Scotsman so desperate to get his money’s worth that he tries to stuff a whole haggis in his gob at once.
    Having seized the offending food, we would place it in a giant chest freezer that would be cleared out by a little man from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). The white MAFF van arrived at the same time, same day, every week, so it wasn’t too difficult for Chaz to time his pilfering. Nobody really checked the weights as we passed the food over to the MAFF man so Chaz had it made. A pound of steak here and a couple of kilos of sausages there. Until, that is, he got a touch too greedy and spotted a huge great ham that had been seized from a Spanish passenger. Now these hams were very popular in Spain (you may have seen them hanging in bars) and are very expensive. But Christmas was two weeks away and Chaz decided to add the ham to his meaty Christmas list.
    He hung on until his late shift, which occurred the day before the arrival of the MAFF van. He then waited until there was a flight in and we were