Burgled!

I suppose we got off fairly lightly.

Friday morning, 7.00 a.m., the husband told me to get up as – sometime in the last six hours (I went to bed around 1.00 a.m.) -- burglars (a burglar?) had paid a surprise and unwelcome visit to our house. The method of entry was clear enough: it had involved both removing and/or smashing a large quantity of glass.

Amazingly we didn’t hear a thing sleeping two floors up.

The good news is that they didn’t take anything that was irreplaceable or uninsured or sentimentally important. I’m not going to help any of the criminal classes who may – improbable as it is  -- be reading this blog, by listing things they might come back for (nothing much with any commercial value at the local car-boot, I promise). Suffice it to say that the villains didn’t take my new laptop on which there was the only finished copy of the lecture I’m about to do in America (yes, I know I’m an idiot not to have a back-up – as I repeatedly tell the students). Instead they took the old one – which I had kept, when I upgraded, for use in places (beaches, swimming pools) where you shouldn’t really use laptops. The idea was that it wouldn’t really matter if it got damaged; for which now read “stolen”.

The immediate problem at 7.00 a.m. was how to get all this dealt with before the husband left for London at 8.30 (he had a meeting that couldn’t really be missed) and I left for Columbus Ohio at 10.30.

We needed the police, and some emergency glaziers to fix the gaping hole that had been left between us and the outside world.

In fact everyone came up trumps.