Garden gone to pot

The leading article in last weekend's Chester Chronicle was about a cannabis factory found in a rented house in the next village to ours. This is the third cannabis factory found in recent weeks in rented houses in what the Chester Chronicle describes as upmarket suburbs. Each house has been rented out, inadvertently, to illegal Chinese immigrants.

Rather ironically the landlord, of the house in the next village, went round to the house, that he had rented out four months ago, to complain that the tenants were not keeping the garden tidy. He became suspicious and alerted the police when he found that the locks had been changed and there was a glow through a crack in the curtains. Inside the house they found over 300 cannabis plants worth about £15,000. The tenants have caused approximately £10,000 worth of damage to the house by installing cables for lighting and heating, which by-passed the electric meter and have resulted in the wallpaper hanging off the walls whilst everything in the house has become mouldy and smelly. The landlord of the house, who is also the landlord of the local pub, did not have contents insurance for the house. Being a fly on the wall of the local pub on Friday night must have been interesting but it is a long time since we went to a pub on a Friday night. We certainly missed a trick when we rented a box of a house, when we first moved to Chester but our landlord's agent regularly inspected the house to make sure that it was clean and tidy and not full of illegal immigrants.