HAVE no fear if you saw a strange man, armed with a child’s fishing rod, frantically looking for a shoe in the River Wye in High Wycombe on Monday evening.

Don’t worry, he is perfectly sane, and was only there because of the World Cup.

His name is Sony Koleth and he is the South Bucks Star production journalist who week after relentless week has to put up with editing this column.

Every week, I ask Sony the same question after emailing hundreds of words of my surreal ramblings to him: “Does this make sense to you?”

Well, this week, it should all make perfect sense for once because this column is about him – after he caused bewildered looks from passers-by on and around The Rye on Monday.

It all began when Sony’s six-year-old son was walking home from school along the London Road with his grandfather.

The lad, caught up in the frenzy surrounding the World Cup, spontaneously decided to imitate one of his heroes and did a brilliant air kick. There was no ball in sight, but perhaps he’d based his technique on previous England displays.

Sadly, it all went as pear-shaped as a Robert Green catch – as his left school shoe flew off and landed in the nearby river.

The boy and his grandfather searched in vain but the shoe was nowhere to be seen, so they called in Sony.

We were on deadline for our Midweek sister paper when he muttered something inexplicable to me about having to run off to fish a shoe out of the river.

I didn’t have a clue at the time what he was on about. But the next day, Sony trudged in to work and related sadly how he too couldn’t find the shoe, despite arming himself with a junior fishing rod and striding back and forth along the London Road with it.

He reckons the shoe is now wedged forever to the bottom of the river bed – a sort of boring High Wycombe version of the Titanic.

Sony’s angling antics earned him some puzzled looks from the good citizens of High Wycombe who couldn’t work out why a respectable 40-year-old man was wandering up and down the river like this.

The shoes will cost about £40 to replace and his son had to go to school in trainers the next day. Sony says he had to write him a note to tell the school why. Goodness knows how he explained that one away.

Perhaps he took a leaf out of my book and asked the teacher: “Does this make sense to you?”