It is not often that something in a local newspaper is genuinely intriguing, but the story on the front page of this week’s Crawley Observer raises more questions than it answers.

The gist of it is that a woman found a suspicious device under her car on Saturday and called the police. They closed the road outside the police station and called the army bomb disposal unit who x-rayed the device and said it was safe. The police took it off the car and are investigating it to find out what it is, because they say they don’t know.

The most trivial question is whether the woman happened to be conveniently parked outside the police station anyway or whether she spotted a suspicious device and drove to the police station anyway.

Next question is what on earth is the device? Sussex police do not have a brilliant track record with suspect devices. Earlier in the year they blew up a box under a bridge which was supposed to be monitoring bat movements and which they had been informed about – they called it ‘disrupting the device’ if I remember rightly. Anyway, they have shown that they like to take no chances so this woman was very lucky to not have her car blown up, and the police must have been extremely confident to have decided to remove the device without knowing what it was.

If you really do not know what something is, how can you be certain it is not dangerous? Or do they know but don’t want to say?

I am saving the most baffling question until last. How did the woman happen to spot the device? I don’t think I have ever checked under my car before setting out anywhere, and I do not know anyone else who has either. Even when I had received (along with the rest of the council) anonymous death threats it never occurred to me to look under the car before setting off.

Actually, another question occurs to me. Why is this story not on the Internet? The Crawley Observer has it on their front page today so they must consider it one of the most newsworthy events of the week, and yet it is not on their website. How can it be important enough to go on the front page but not important enough to get on the website? I cross-checked with the Argus, which keeps a better archive of news and its not there, nor is it on the BBC News’ Sussex section. Did they discover after the paper had gone to press that it was all bollocks? Or is it just that the Observer website isn’t really as good as it could be?

Good pictures though. At the time there was a possibility that something could go off so fair play for getting the photos. I hope Jon Rigby used a long lens just in case!