The cat burglar

1.18am, and I become vaguely aware of a house alarm blaring away in the distance.

Nikki: "Is that our alarm?"
I listen more carefully, in my sleep-befuddled state.
Me: "Don't think so. It *is* close though."
I get out of bed and plod over to the window. When I pull back the curtain I can see our alarm box flashing its blue light angrily.
Me: "Fuck! It IS ours!"
As I open the bedroom door and the internal alarm becomes clearly audible, several thoughts crowd my still-not-fully-awake mind.
Should I go back and get my baseball bat?
Should I turn the alarm off BEFORE I check downstairs, alerting any intruder to the fact there's someone awake?
Has someone noticed the appliances being delivered and decided it's a good time to go on the rob, while they're all still in boxes?
I quickly decide plenty of light and an aggressive demeanour is the best approach to scare the intruder away. I cancel the alarm, turn the lights on and start downstairs.
Halfway down, I hear a noise in the kitchen. Bloody hell. How have they got in without making a noise?
I reach the hall, turn all the downstairs lights on and march boldly into the kitchen with a no-nonsense face on and the most don't-mess-with-me posture I can muster. I come face to face with the intruder.

A young tortie-and-white kitten, cowering at the other end of the kitchen.

She utters a frightened miaow and scuttles under the nearest cupboard unit.

Then I remember the fitters have just the day before completed coring out a 15cm hole in the wall for the ducting. A hole that presumably, from the outside, looks like a cat flap.

I retrieve the keys for the patio door, prop the kitchen door in the doorway to prevent the kitten escaping into the rest of the house, open the outside door and persuade her to go and burgle someone else, by which time Nikki has come down to check that I'm alright. With around 16 gallons of adrenaline pumping around inside me, I decide going back to bed isn't an option, so we set the coffee maker going and settle down in the lounge for some (very) early morning telly.

There but for the grace of God...

The first funeral was held yesterday for one of the victims of the Cumbrian shootings. It was attended by one of Nikki's colleagues and took place in the sleepy Lake District town of Gosforth.

Some news items swim past, barely touching the surface of our consciousness. So many horrors in the world, so regularly delivered to our living rooms, if we gave them all full heart we'd be constantly ragged with emotion, enraged at our inability to help, railing ineffectually at the perpetrators (if human) or the universe (if natural).

This story though, has a special and chilling significance for us. It is only five weeks since I stood outside the local general store in Gosforth, not 100 yards from where that young man was randomly gunned down. Had we taken our holiday five weeks later, or had Bird gone on his mad spree five weeks earlier, we could so easily have been involved. As eye witnesses, or as victims.

Twice in that idyllic week we spent in the Lakes I drove alone to the shop first thing in the morning for breakfast supplies. And on at least two other occasions, we both attended the store. In uncountable ways, life is a matter of timing, and had our timing been off in this respect, I might never have returned to the cottage, leaving Nikki wondering where on Earth I'd got to, or we both might not have come back from the Lakes.

In nearby Seascale, where another two murders were committed, we spent a couple of hours walking on the beach, picking up pebbles, breathing the sea air, enjoying the view and exchanging polite "Good mornings" with the few other people on the beach. The thought that one of those we encountered could have been carrying a gun with intent to use it on whomever he met, still sends involuntary shivers through me.

The natural desire for retribution, or at the very least for an explanation, is so often thwarted in cases like this after the gunman turns his weapon on himself at the last. Those directly involved are left without an outlet for their anger or grief, staring down their own barrel: a lifetime of anguish and loss. And for the rest of us, for a time, the stark realisation that these terrible incidents can happen anywhere, at any time, without either meaning or warning, is enough to account for some restless dreams.

A stain on your character

I'm thinking bloodstain. With DNA. On a database.

The European Court of Human Rights declared yesterday that it's illegal for UK police to hold on file the DNA signatures of people who have been arrested but subsequently either not charged with an offence, or acquitted. Apparently (and surprisingly, I feel) there were approaching a million of these records - out of the 4.5 million in total - of which 40,000 were for children. DNA from people who as far as the legal system is concerned are guilty of absolutely nothing at all, but whose DNA the police were hanging onto "just in case."

The case was brought by a couple of guys from Sheffield - one who was charged with an offence but where the charges were dropped a few months later, and another who was tried for attempted robbery and subsequently acquitted - who didn't fancy having their records on file for all time. And who can blame them? For me, this case raises a number of profound questions:

• It seemed fairly obvious to me, way before the verdict, that this represented a breach of human rights. Yet the case went before the House of Lords and was thrown out. So that presumably means either the Law Lords are incompetent at interpreting Human Rights legislation, or they were party to, and their judgement affected by, the government's approach to DNA fingerprinting...
• ...which appears to be the establishment by stealth of a national DNA database, populated with DNA from anyone the police don't like the look of. That may sound alarmist, but if the only criterion for storing your DNA is that you've been arrested for something, and the police can arrest anyone they like (and they can), then it's a fact. Let's be clear, I don't have a problem with holding the DNA of known (i.e. tried and convicted) criminals. With reoffending rates as high as they are, it would be madness not to. And we're not talking here about holding unmatched DNA from crime scenes. Those records will continue to be held, offering the chance of a match with someone arrested later for any offence anywhere else in the country. Such cases have already occurred. But innocent people do not deserve to be tainted by having their DNA on record when they've done nothing.
• Whether or not you believe in the benefit of a national DNA database (and I do, as it happens), its purpose must be clearly articulated, debated by parliament in the usual way, and probably, for a change as far-reaching as this, subject to a referendum. Either record everyone, or no-one. However, that said, this government (or any government come to that) has proved time and again that they simply do not have the competence to handle large volumes of sensitive data. Until they have demonstrated such competence, with data of a less personal nature, no-one should trust them with their DNA records. And that's before we get into any debate about the potential for misuse.
  
• A rather over-excited article in the Telegraph (still, what do you expect from them?) states: "Deleting the records could mean that thousands of rapists, murderers and other criminals are not caught." What utter nonsense. Despite a huge increase in the number of DNA profiles on record, crime solving rates have hardly changed. Scotland already deletes DNA records where suspects are not charged, or are acquitted. Is Scotland therefore full of "thousands" of uncaught rapists and murderers? Good grief.
  
• On a more general note, what is the point of the House of Lords when their rulings can be thrown out by a higher court? What used to be the highest legal authority in the country is now effectively reduced to the level of a magistrate's court. Only there to provide a filter for the more powerful European Court, and handle the easy cases. But this means that cases like the one I'm discussing here are subject to interminable delay. Those two Sheffield lads started this legal journey in 2001! EIGHT years they've been waiting for yesterday's result. We may as well do away with the legal responsibilities of the Lords and fund a European court that is resourced well enough to handle all the cases across the whole EU. At least we'd be assured of getting to the real, final answer a sight quicker than we do at the moment, and at a much reduced cost.

Makes me seethe (©1994 Mr. Angry)

Bankrupt stock

So the government, having contributed to the drink problem in the UK by relaxing the licensing laws (you know it's true, even if their statistics have been cooked to say otherwise), is now demanding an end to happy hours and cheap booze in supermarkets in an effort to cut the cost of policing hordes of drunken idiots in city centres.

When are we going to stop penalising the entire country for the behaviour of an antisocial minority? When are "they" going to start considering the "human rights" of the majority, like me, who enjoy going to the odd happy hour, and/or buying their bargain booze at Morrisons, and are capable of consuming it responsibly without staggering barely conscious into a city centre, puking over a copper or smashing up a bus stop? Why does the government's every reaction to a problem have to have the effect of carpet bombing, when what they need is a tactical strike?

We all have to bump (and all too often grind) our way over hundreds of speed control humps on account of a handful of overexuberant spotty erks going joyriding. A few high-profile deterrent sentences would have sorted the problem out in short order but instead local authorities go for the easy option, causing discomfort and inconvenience to everyone.

Makes me seethe (©1993 Mr. Angry).

Environ...mental

In the news recently - a pensioner prosecuted (and fined) for putting a tea bag in her regular bin, instead of with the garden waste.

This madness isn't restricted to the home. Here in my office we've had our bins taken away. Another "good corporate citizen" initiative that looks good while achieving very little, and making everyday life just that little bit harder. We now have to march halfway across the office to the "recycling point" and decide which of two bins to put our rubbish in - recyclable material or landfill. So off I stroll with my little parcel of lunch detritus. Two apple cores, two Babybel cheese skins (purple wax) and a banana skin. All into landfill. Yet the majority of it could be composted, so where's the "green" in that? And after the above incident with the tea bag we're told we shouldn't throw food waste into landfill because it gives off methane (a Very Bad Greenhouse Gas, children), so where's the "green" in THAT?

The bins are clearly marked, but on the evidence to date people are clearly confused as to what's recyclable and what isn't. Even with the help of the little pictures on the bin lids (God help us…it's like being back in primary school), folk are still tossing their recyclable plastic cups from the drinks machine into the landfill bin.

Now I know this might sound elitist and snobby, but the people who work here are supposed to be of above average intelligence. We only recruit graduates, and everyone is busy designing high-powered systems for use by central and local government and key financial institutions. And yet, even with the aid of pictures, some of these geniuses still can't work out whether a plastic cup should go left, or right.

I give up and return to my desk. Via the gents, since having carried my parcel over to the bins my hands are rather damp and sticky. Still it could be worse. I could be the one sifting the contents of the bins into the right piles for different recycling plants. Or searching through the landfill bin for misplaced cups. Someone MUST be doing this, right? They can't simply be chucking the bags into a skip. Can they?

An injection of adrenalin

3am. My sleeping ears hear a noise downstairs that my brain interprets as someone trying to open the cloakroom door. Again.

Only this time they can't, because I've fitted locks.

I leap out of bed, put something on (unlike last time O_O), grab my trusty weapon (thanks, Paul!) and head downstairs, making as much noise as possible and turning lights on as I go.

I unlock the cloakroom door and fling it open, ready for a confrontation.

There's no-one there, and the new window is intact.

I check the kitchen and study. Nothing. I peer out to the back, and to the front. Nothing.

I return The Weapon to its resting place and climb back into bed. "Did you hear something?" Nikki asks.

5.20am. With adrenaline still coursing around my body, I check the clock for the fiftieth time in two hours.

6.20am. The alarm wakes me up.

12.45pm. A colleague with whom I'm lunching, and who has also been burgled recently, asks me how long the paranoia lasts. "At least six weeks," I tell him wrily.

All keyed up

Nikki found our old house keys this afternoon.

Out for a smoke in the front garden, she saw something glistening in the bushes. The full set, still on its Indian-bead-and-bell keyring. After we forked out £250 to have all the locks changed (insert wry smile and rolling of the eyes here).

No sign of the other two sets though. Which begs some questions:

1. Were they dropped as the tw@s made their getaway on Thursday morning, and have been lying there ever since?
2. If (1) is true and we'd found them earlier, would we have felt safe not changing the locks?
3. Were they discarded more recently, after said tw@s had returned to try them in the door?
4. If (3) is true, how did they know the set they threw away would have been the right set?

It's all very mysterious. Not to mention irritating. Nice to have the keyring back though. I missed its tinkly little bell. Make no mistake though...we won't be keeping any keys on a rack by the door from now on.

A burglar disturbs me

Funny, but I thought I was coping alright yesterday.

Most of the day was taken up with hanging around waiting for, or actually dealing with, people connected in one way or another with the break-in. SOCO; the locksmith (who doubled up as the boarder-upper); the window guy who is going to make and fit something a little more secure and less easy to chisel out; the police returning to take a full statement.

Nikki had stayed at home for mutual moral support, and also in case SOCO needed elimination prints, so we spent a relatively busy day coping with all that, and trying to get some work done at the same time.

As the day slowed down into evening and the evening, in turn, wore on, I became aware of a growing feeling of unease. Starting with a faint fluttering in the tum, and graduating into a tight feeling in the chest via an inability to concentrate on the TV we were watching and faint nausea. I soon realised what it was. I didn't want to go to bed. I didn't want to risk falling asleep and waking up again with someone trying to break in.

Completely irrational, of course. For a start they'll be long gone by now. Even if they intended to come back and try the keys they nicked, they'll give it a few days. Secondly with the window boarded up, any further attempts to break in will be a lot noisier. And lastly, I'd worked out a way of making it impossible to open the cloakroom door from the inside. At least, without destroying the door. So I was able to tell myself, intellectually, that we were more secure than we had been.

Didn't help though.

I disturb a burglar

Thank God for those night-time pees. On returning to bed around 3am this morning after one such visit, I heard a strange tapping sound. Now this old house has a variety of creaks, pops, murmurs and whistles that took quite a lot of getting used to when we first moved in, but this was a noise I hadn't heard before. I pricked up my ears and lay there in the dark, listening.

Tap, tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Weird. I thought at first it was the cat flap, but it's never that loud, or that persistent. Then I wondered whether it was the high wind we'd had last night. Everything went quiet for a time, so I turned over. Tap, tap. And then another noise. Louder this time and even more unusual. No, something definitely needed investigating.

I stopped by the spare bedroom to see if I could see anything outside that could be causing the noise, but all appeared normal so I proceeded downstairs in the dark. The memory of this gives me shivers now. Not only would I not have been able to see any potential attacker very clearly, but worse, I was only wearing a pyjama top. Mind you, that would have been enough to scare them off! Anyway I peeked into the kitchen (nothing) and the lounge and dining room (nothing - although I wasn't expecting to find anything in there - if they'd tried to go in they'd have tripped the alarm). It was then I noticed the downstairs toilet door was open and there was a helluva draft coming through it. Sure enough the leaded window had been removed from the frame. The tapping I'd heard had been the chiselling away of the putty.

Whoever it was, and they must have been very small and skinny to get through that window, can literally only have been in the house a few seconds. When they heard me coming downstairs I presume they dived back out of the window so I never actually had to confront them. My initial scouting having revealed no missing property, the only other thing worrying my "3am I've just woken up" head was how to secure the house and get back to bed. I rooted out and fitted two strong bolts to the inside of the loo door, fastened them, and decided to leave the rest until a more reasonable hour (i.e. after daybreak).

Who was I kidding? Nikki and I lay there for almost an hour talking about whatifs and whatdowedonows so finally around 4.30am we got up and made ourselves a pot of coffee. It wasn't until we were on our way back upstairs with our coffees that I noticed all the keys on the keyrack were missing. When Nikki checked her purse, all her cash had been taken too.

All things considered though, we were lucky. When you realise what had not been taken that probably would have been if I hadn't disturbed them. Even my car keys were still lying on the hall table undisturbed, although the police later told us that was probably because the perp was too young to drive!

Still, it's bad enough. We have to have all the locks changed and so do the owners of the other sets of keys. Plus boarding up of the window in advance of getting a more secure unit made and fitted. And of course, when you take into consideration the insurance excess, loss of NCD and increased premiums, in the end it's probably not going to be worth putting in a claim.

When the police arrived to "take down our particulars" they asked if there's any CCTV footage. The answer, sadly, is no although I've since considered fitting it. In the end though, does that send out the wrong message? With the outside of the property bristling with cameras doesn't it simply say "there's summat here worth nicking"? A colleague of mine suffered a spate of burglaries over 2-3 years and each time he increased his security measures they managed to defeat them. He ended up with a full alarm system, CCTV, bars on all the downstairs windows and reinforced doors, and they still got in. I reckon all you can do is secure the perimeter (the window they took out was the only one without a sensor) and hope it's enough discouragement.

Something the SOCO man said as he was dusting for prints (as predicted, they wore gloves), is it was probably a kid sent in by older scrotes specifically to collect keys so they can come back later and do a proper job. I think that's the scariest part of all.

Arseholes

This is what I woke up to this morning. Well, not THIS exactly, because this isn't a photo of my actual car. Funnily enough my first thought on discovering that some little scrote had put a baseball bat through my passenger window was not "oh, I must go get my camera and take a photo of that for my blog." But you get the picture. Ha ha.

Nothing was stolen. Truth is, there's nothing in the car TO steal, but since there was a heavy frost last night, the bastard had to smash the window to find that out. And if it had been one of those rare but occasional days when I'd forgotten to take the car radio panel out? Well then he would have won the star prize. A bog-standard, manufacturer's issue, crappy CD radio that won't play 8 out of 10 CDs and takes an hour to warm up to the point where it will turn on, if you made the mistake of turning it off. Whoop-di-do.

Who buys knock-off car radios anyway? And what would it fetch - a tenner? I would gladly give the twat a tenner just to save the hassle: a very cold and windy drive there and back to drop Nikki at work, staying in all day for the glass repair man and therefore not being able to get the grocery shopping done until 9pm, and an hour sweeping the broken bits off the footpath which, being old tarmac, hangs on to those little bitty pieces like they were diamonds. Oh and the small matter of £120 for the replacement glass and fitting. Which coincidentally is exactly the same as the insurance excess for window damage.

There's just a chance that someone saw me fiddling with my iPod and RoadTrip a couple of Sundays ago and wondered if two weeks was long enough for me to become complacent and leave it in the car, but the most likely explanation is they did it for a laugh. The same kind of laugh they get from smashing the glass bus shelters that we see littering the pavements every few weeks. Funny, isn't it?

Smashing!

If we ever start to believe that we're living in a little civilised oasis here in our new place, and forget that we're actually part of the second largest urban conurbation in the UK, the recent spate of vandalism is more than enough to act as a wake-up call. After a lull of some months, suddenly everywhere we look there are smashed bus shelters once again, their sad little piles of broken glass littering the morning pavements as we drive to work.

It must be a sad and boring life indeed if the best you can do for entertainment is drive around the streets of Manchester in a beat-up old jalopy with a couple of mates and a baseball bat, and vent your frustrations on a load of defenceless bus shelters. The satisfaction you get from the *pop* as the glass shatters and the *tinkle* as it falls to the ground must be short-lived. Do you feel any remorse? No, I don't suppose you even know what it means. Do you ever think about the people who have to use the smashed bus shelters every day? They're pretty much people like you, except most of them will be on their way to work - another concept that I expect doesn't have much meaning for you.

I guess Manchester City Council have worked out the commercials and figure that it's cheaper to continually replace the smashed panels of glass with more glass, rather than build their bus shelters out of more durable materials. They must do, because smashed shelters have been a feature of our urban landscape for at least five years. Or maybe they think if the yobs take their anger out on the shelters, they'll leave other more sensitive targets, like people, alone.

Ignorance is no defence

Sorry to post two traffic-related rants consecutively, but it seems that standards of road use around the Manchester area are reaching previously unheard of lows just recently. It's not just discourtesy, road rage or stupidity but out-and-out law breaking, purely because the perpetrators know they can get away with it. In the last week I've witnessed:

• A guy turning the wrong way up a one-way street, in the centre of Chorlton, in full view of the massed shoppers on a Saturday afternoon
• A white van driving more than a mile down a bus lane just so that he can be first to turn left at the next set of lights
• A cyclist without lights riding on the pavement in the dark

and of course there's the usual crop of red light runners, cyclists included. At the junction near our place where I have to wait to turn right every morning, the number of people coming in the opposite direction and jumping the red light has reached epic proportions. To the extent where I can't complete my right-turn manoeuvre until the traffic starting out from their green lights to right and left is almost upon me. This is an insidious problem. It started out, and not so very long ago, with people pushing their luck accelerating through amber lights. They left it later and later, until they were crossing the junction as amber turned to red. A few years ago, people started tailgating the last car through the red light. What their defence would have been I have no idea but it didn't matter - very few if any were prosecuted. Confidence grew, and now three are four cars regularly tailgate over a red light at each change.

Do we really have to get to the stage where every set of traffic lights has to be fitted with cameras before these arrogant, ignorant people will obey the law? One thing's certain - there's no sanction worrying them at present. It's simple: no enforcement + no penalty = no obedience. And more and more people are working that out, led on by the example of the few.

Trouble is, it's the thin end of the wedge. Once you start down the path of picking and choosing which laws you obey and which are just "inconvenient," the next stop is anarchy.