When I was a kid, the Intrepid Fox was called the Archway Tavern, a notorious pub that stood at the centre of the Archway circulatory system and was definitely not a place where a well brought up Kentish Town boy would go drinking. The original Intrepid Fox was a famous metal pub stroke music venue which was driven out of Soho as an early casualty of the blandification of the West End. The venue moved briefly to St Giles and then to the unlamented Tavern and proceeded to paint the inside and outside as black as a teenager’s bedroom and stuck a ton of Goth iconography on the walls in the hope that Marilyn Manson would pop round for a pint. It actually closed down not long after we raided it, but just for once I can say with a clear conscience, it wasn’t my fault.

Archway is where the post-war dream of the urban motorway died in the teeth of local opposition and the inability of the designers to answer basic traffic management questions. Thus the A1 remained unwidened and what was then the Archway Tavern stood proudly like a combination tank trap and brick shithouse in the way of progress. Famously, the planning inquiry got so unruly that the Planning Inspector fled through a fire escape to escape the protestors.

I’ve often wondered if such ‘awkward’ spots in London are somehow sacred to Mr Punch – the spirit of riot and rebellion – and maybe that was why I thought I heard him laughing the afternoon we nicked Reynard the Fox.

Or it might have been carbon monoxide poisoning because me and Caroline were stuck on a strip of pavement thirty centimetres wide with nothing but a safety barrier between us and three lanes of congestion. We were there because this was where the Intrepid Fox had its back door, and where we expected Reynard to make his egress, at some speed, about two minutes after Nightingale and Lady Helena went in the front.

‘Whatever you do,’ I told Caroline, ‘don’t put your hands on him – if you physically touch him it gets legally complicated. If you think he’s going to get away see if you can trip him up with your magic rope trick and I’ll go sit on him.’

‘Do you like being a policeman?’ asked Caroline.

‘Love it,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘You’re a bright guy – it just seems like a waste.’

‘You think I should be a stockbroker instead,’ I said. ‘Or a celebrity chef or something constructive like that?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re an idealist.’

I asked Caroline what she planned to do with her skills, then.

‘I’m going to teach myself to fly,’ she said.

‘With magic?’

‘Of course with magic,’ said Caroline. ‘I already have a pilot’s licence.’

‘And when you learn to fly,’ I said, ‘what are you going to do with that?’