Top Cat

I spotted a neighbourhood policing notice in Chipping Sodbury Waitrose and immediately realised I was no longer the intended audience. Not because of the policing, but because of the name. Cheryl Dibble. PCS O Dibble. Printed, laminated, and displayed without the faintest awareness that for anyone of a certain age this is not a name, it is a cartoon.

This is not some vague echo of British slang or Carry On policing. It is Top Cat. Officer Dibble. New York’s least effective lawman, eternally outwitted by a yellow cat in a bin. A cultural reference so specific that it bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the hindbrain of anyone who watched television before colour was compulsory.

Anyone under 60 will walk straight past. Anyone over 60 will pause, reread it, and hear a tiny internal voice saying “Top Cat!” before feeling faintly embarrassed about having done so. No disrespect is intended. None is possible. This is pure cognitive reflex.

Of course, this is not nominative determinism. Avon and Somerset Police are not quietly recruiting based on Hanna-Barbera casting logic. Cheryl Dibble did not join the force because of her surname. But the surname did arrive first, decades earlier, and it has been patiently waiting for a moment like this.

What makes it funny is the complete innocence of the poster. It is modern community policing to the core. Friendly faces. Baptist church hall. Tea, probably biscuits. Meanwhile, half the shoppers are mentally overlaying a cartoon policeman chasing a cat with a traffic cone on his head.

This is how cultural ageing actually works. Not through grand debates about values, but through the slow accumulation of references that no longer land. To younger shoppers, this is just a name. To older ones, it is an ambush by Saturday morning television.

No offence. No mockery. Just one of those rare moments when public information accidentally collides with a shared cultural memory. Community policing meets Hanna-Barbera. And somewhere, quietly, Officer Dibble is still shaking his fist at a cat.