£15,000 and they found 50 radios – and he “often had them on at the same time”. First question: power. Did he plug them all in? Multiple 4/6/8-way extension leads? (installing that many sockets would surely attract suspicion, and there’s regulations these days about what DIY work you can do by yourself.)

So batteries then? You’d need a hell of a lot of them. Perhaps that’s the reason – the new radios come with a set of batteries, so when they ran out, he decided to just bought a new radio instead. More convenient.

And which radios anyway? Divide £15,000 by 50 and you get a price of £300 each. The most expensive DAB radio I’ve seen was about £200, so I can only assume some of them were thrown away.

Finally, the original article mentions the radios being stored in two black bin liners. Not a good place to keep them – bin liners aren’t very strong and your radios will fall out of the bottom. Better to buy a few fewer radios and spend the money you save on a nice protective case. Or keep the original boxes, in case you later decide to sell them on ebay.

Disclaimer: I’m not wishing to make fun of anyone with OCD (which I suspect is something everyone has, depending on how you define it; email, blogging, listening to the radio.. ). And he did steal the money, so..