To those who haven’t been there, Lowestoft is a flourishing seaside holiday resort on the sunny sunrise coast of East Suffolk. With its two or so piers, its pretty pastel-coloured beach huts, its theatres, parks, and beautiful marina, it sounds like the quintessential English seaside town perfect for a day out with all the family.

Well, it’s not.

In actual fact, Lowestoft is a grotty, dilapidated, dump of a resort, populated by delinquent youths, violent pimps, and gangs of organized drug dealers. Strung-out losers, high as kites, stagger between shop doorways, fighting with one another in pursuit of last night’s leftover paint thinner dregs, or discarded, half-eaten Wimpy burgers. Take a stroll down the High Street after dark and you’ll feel like you’ve entered a scene from Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video. Worst of all is the chewing gum that plagues its uneven, piss-riddled pavements.

Crammed with pebbles

On a good day, the view from the shoreline resembles a post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland,  and, in the unlikely event that you can find a patch of sand on the beach that isn’t crammed with pebbles or contaminated with empty laughing gas canisters or fag butts, it will probably be occupied by a mixture of fleshy and emaciated, milky-white chavs, polluting the air with expletives, and littering the surrounding area with their illegitimate kids’ empty drinks cans and sweet wrappers.

It is against this unholy backdrop, that a uniformed dog from the Suffolk Constabulary’s Kestral team – which attempts to combat Suffolk’s never-ending supply of illegal drugs and anti-social behaviour – so frequently came into contact with Class A drugs that he had to be sent to K9 rehab to recover. After assisting in the capture of countless thugs and criminals, and helping recover illegal drugs with a street value running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, the once lively, intuitive, and well-groomed German Shepherd, ‘General’, ended up resembling a disheveled and disorientated Hyena.

Eyeballs re-aligned

The unnerved and intoxicated public servant has been recovering at the K9 veterinary compound at Hendon Police College, in… well… Hendon. His handler, PC Vernon Krenshaw, who visits the poorly mutt frequently told this reporter that it has taken two weeks just for his eyeballs to re-align, although thankfully, he is on the road to recovery. PC Krenshaw hopes he will be rejoining him on the beat before too long.

Why not visit beautiful Lowestoft for a relaxing weekend away?