On Neath Voice Facebook page recently someone posted up a topic that had the followers of the site suddenly piling in. I'm calling it "The Curious Case of the Old Frenchie". Yes, Old Frenchie aka Rubber Johnny had mysteriously appeared on one of the streets in Neath Town Centre. The post came complete with a mugshot of him, lying dishevelled and wilted, alone on a brick-paviored street. To protect Old Frenchie's identity the image above is a library one - so taken on tarmac, not paviors, I'm afraid. All that European money spent on refurbishing the streets of Neath, it somehow seemed appropriate that our Continental friend, Old Frenchie, now came to be resting on them.

Anyway, the person that posted about Old Frenchie ended the message with "Stephen Karl Hunt". Being a complete numpty on this social media business I turned to Mrs STaN for advice. "Look at this," I said, "is this person suggesting that Councillor Hunt was somehow responsible for Old Frenchie being there?"

"Don't be bloody stupid, STaN," she said. (I've heard that more times than I can remember). "It sends a message to Steve so he knows what's going on in this thread."

Others waded into the Facebook conversation. I watched from a distance, not allowed to participate because I don't really exist on Neath Voice.

"Where is the streetcleaner with the mobile bin and brush?" someone asked.

Another suggested, "Why don't you just pick up Old Frenchie and put him in the bin?"

That seemed like a perfectly good idea to me. If you didn't want to actually touch Old Frenchie wth your bare hand, you could pop in to Poundland and buy a pair of rubber gloves. You'd have five little cousins of Frenchie on the digits of one hand then though.

Ex-councillor Andrew Jenkins (and now ex-Labour Party too) waded in, a man that can sniff out litter and an opportunity to post onto Neath Voice from half a world away. "Disgusting how some people treat our Town Centre," said Andy. "If I was in Neath I'd pop down with my litter-picker and deal with it myself." A few more messages were posted by others, some rather rude and some I didn't understand, having been brought up as a Roman Catholic - what did I know about Old Frenchie and his sort? Then Andy piped in again. "Why don't we have a Neath Town litter pick?" I cringed at the prospect. An army of attention seeking Good Samaritans looking for mates of Old Frenchie, just piling these unfortunates into plastic bags and posting photos of it onto Twitter and Facebook. How could they possibly treat them like that?

I really felt for Old Frenchie. From the nature of the comments I could see that no-one wanted him on the streets of Neath. I imagined the dozens of people that had given him a wide berth, casting disgusted or furtive glances at him. Some might have laughed at or mocked his predicament. Maybe some had even spat on him. "Was it really like this for the beggars and homeless on Neath's streets," I wondered? Hadn't I personally witnessed people crossing the road rather than walk close by a Big Issue seller? "And don't get holier than thou," I said to myself. "Don't you do exactly the same thing when you see the ambulance chasing lawyers in town?"

"What would a post-Brexit Neath be like," I pondered? I imagined people on Neath Voice Facebook again.

"There's an Albanian in Victoria Gardens Stephen Karl Hunt."

"Hang on - I'll send a clean-up team around right now. Has he been there long do you know? Tell people not to go near him. This is a job for the professionals."

I checked Facebook again. Bloody hell - another Rubber Johnny had appeared outside Wilko. I imagined the panic this would cause among the population. Were we under some sort of attack by an organisation of Onanists? Two Old Frenchies in one day both not a few hundred yards from each other. Was there a solitary phantom wanker in town? Maybe some tosser was trying to send a coded message to the local councillors that covered the town centre?

Surely it ought to be made a police matter. That red scene-of-crime tape needed to be placed around those Old Frenchies to protect the evidence. How could they possibly have got there without there being some DNA traces? And we've got CCTV to look at as well. Check the footage for someone in a long mac, a hat pulled over their eyes, sweating profusely and carrying a box of Kleenex. That's got to be suspicious on a fine, late-Spring day.

"Ooh, la, la. Je t'aime beaucoup, Johnny Boy! Let me get you a drink. Milk-shake, n'est ce pas?"

I eventually went to bed with my mind in a spin, the matter still up in the air. After a sleepless night worrying about it I called up Neath Voice the next morning for an update. But the Old Frenchies' story had gone. Disappeared. I wondered if I'd dreamt it all. So I messaged Stephen Karl Hunt.

"No, it really happened" he told me. "But we were up to the task. A team went out there and terminated the Old Frenchies. I then pulled the thread to prevent people making fun of the tossers".

Their bodies had been picked up and they had been disposed of. No inquest, no further investigation. The Frenchies had gone the way of so many of their kind in the past. Stuffed into a hole. That's a hole in the ground in this case, I hasten to add. Landfill.

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