As if any more proof of the global nature of today's economy were needed, the theft of all the lead from my garage roof provides it. To add insult to injury, they took our wheelie-bin too, presumably to cart off the metal. You have to pay for a new wheelie-bin, and I feel I give Hackney council enough money already.

You could be forgiven for thinking nicking lead was a thing of the past, consigned to the scrapheap of criminal history along with fiddling your ration card and counterfeiting groats, and up until a year or so ago you would have been right. But the world price of the soft, heavy, poisonous stuff has, rather like the rain in my garage, been going through the roof, thanks to insatiable demand from Asia. I take no comfort in knowing that even now, my flashing is pootling around Guangzhou in some proud Chinese bloke's new car battery.

And while my man at the London Metal Exchange tells me lead prices have recently come off sharply, this news has yet to filter down to the roof-stripping classes. Earlier this year stockpiles of lead were down to a mere 48 hours' supply, and so the dishonest started dipping into other people's stash, like mine. It's the same story with copper (ripping the wiring out of power lines and railway tracks is a growth business, albeit one with high risks attached), zinc, aluminium and tin, hence the reopening of a tin mine in Hemerdon, Devon, last exploited during the war. As for nickel (one component of stainless steel), at $26,000 per tonne it's worth keeping your cutlery under lock and key.

On the bright side, beside the boost to employment, if not the value of second homes, in Hemerdon, I can see three positive outcomes to the high price of metal. One is it might encourage the development of alternatives (I'm thinking we should redo our garage roof in thatch. Or maybe wattle and daub). Another is that legitimate recycling will increase as it becomes more profitable. And a third is that the streets will become cleaner as the cannibalisation of fly-tipped junk is incentivised. Indeed this is already happening: Steptoe and Son ride again, and good luck to them, so long as it wasn't them clambering about on my garage roof in the middle of the night.

What isn't going to happen is the arrest of the perpetrators, as the Metropolitan police continue their transformation into an offshoot of the insurance and counselling industries, more eager to dole out crime reference numbers and unsolicited victim support leaflets than investigate anything.

Even at my wife's fourth attempt to interest the CID, an officer kept interrupting to ask how she was “feeling”. She said she was feeling it'd be nice if a detective came round to do a spot of detection. Yet when a scene-of-crime officer did turn up, several days after the event, she said she was not allowed out on a roof (even a flat one, one-storey high) to lift fingerprints for fear of injury. If the Chinese economy is to slow down any time soon, no one will be able to blame the Met.

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