We can't relax over this crime

But often they don’t end too badly – a bicycle is ‘borrowed’ to get someone home and dumped somewhere relatively near where it can be recovered with maybe a couple of additional scuffs.

However the situation that faced a regular rider returning to her bike, safely and securely locked within the sight of CCTV at the bike racks at North Beach, was very worrying.

Clearly the lock had been deliberately and knowingly attacked with some kind of tool.

This may have been an opportunistic theft – after all, the bike was recovered a couple of days later – but was only so because the perpetrator had gone out equipped to do damage.

Guernsey’s low crime rate can induce a level of complacency about security. And as the police point out, many of these bicycles are very expensive machines. You could get a third-hand car for much less than some of these bicycles brand new.

They do deserve to be properly and securely locked up. But a good combination lock, properly used, should be sufficient in Guernsey.

For if we can’t protect our own possessions in public without needing to go to ridiculous lengths, then we cease to be Guernsey as we know it for crime – we’ve become the UK.

And nobody in our community wants to see that.