My secondment to the New York Police Department was nearly over and yet the NYPD officers were still taking every opportunity to laugh at me.

They thought my slow meander to the driver’s window of a stopped car was laughable. By the time I was ready to ask the driver for his licence, they had removed him from his vehicle, handcuffed him, searched him and the interior of his vehicle. Any respect they had ever had for British policing was rapidly being eroded by my amateurishness.

When it was time for me to fly back to the UK, my American colleagues gave me a box of three cream cakes to take back to my superiors. However, as I boarded, I stood too close to the front of the plane. The cakes floated up into the air and were sucked into the engines. I couldn’t even carry cakes properly.