September 7, 2007 - Friday
Welcome to the neighbourhood...
After the seething, foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the descent into hitherto-uncharted circles of Hell that is the public transport experience that constituted yesterday's blog, I was hoping to post something a little different today. Something more upbeat, something enthusiastic, perhaps waxing lyrical about something I particularly enjoy, perhaps simply musing on the understated beauty of a sunset. Y'know, something that would make me appear to be a bit more of a well-rounded, balanced individual, as opposed to the melancholic, cynical, world-weary and occasionally downright pissed-off person I must come across as in these entries. Sadly, circumstances have arisen that have put any possibility of a happy blog temporarily on hold.
Namely, my house was robbed last night.
Now, some background may be useful to some of you here. At the beginning of last month, my friend Jack and I moved in together. And we're not talking 'civil partnership' or anything here - Jack's girlfriend Helen joined us a few weeks later when she got back from America, where she'd been teaching fat kids to dance, or some such thing. At the beginning of this week, another friend, Logan, moved in as well. We've been going through all the usual stuff that happens soon after people move in to a new place together - minor squabbles about housework and washing up, bill-related consternation, an ongoing pass-the-parcel game involving the one set of keys that we had between us (until Helen got herself copies of the front door keys, anyway), all that jazz. The only variable we couldn't really have predicted was our crazy neighbour, Q.
Q lives a couple of doors away from us, and became a regular visitor to the house not long after we moved in. Not that we especially wanted him there, mind you. I recognised him from when I was at school, and recalled him as being something of a dodgy fuck. Several of our friends told us to keep an eye on him as well. But he had a tendency of ringing the doorbell, then pretty much just rushing past us into the house as soon as the door was opened, pacing from room to room, talking a fast-paced stream of gibberish about being the one who 'runs the close', asking to borrow DVDs and generally acting both hyperactive and shady at the same time. We gave him the benefit of the doubt, though - DVDs he borrowed from us ended up coming back in a timely fashion, and he lent us a few of his own as well. We even put up with the empty beer barrels he brought round to the house one day, claiming he was having a house party and needed to clear some room, and that he'd come to pick them up the next day (they ended up being there for a month, until the police took them away last night - but I'm getting ahead of myself). He could just be a bit eccentric, we reasoned. Not bad, as such, just a little bit unaware of things like propriety and personal boundaries, and when he's being utterly damned cheeky.
Well, we were quickly proven to be a little too trusting.
Yesterday evening, I got back to the house from about at about 5:40pm. Logan was literally right behind me, having been out of the house since 4:45pm to enrol at college. Jack turned up about ten minutes after me, and we were all gathered in the kitchen, Logan making me and him a cup of tea, all of us chatting about the day so far, bills, stuff like that. Jack mentioned that Helen had said that she thought she had lost her front door keys. Bugger, thought we. Oh well, not too much hassle - just get some more cut. Then, Jack headed upstairs, and me and Logan, still nattering away, went into the front room - which is when Logan quickly noticed the large, blank space on the living room floor where there should have been an Xbox 360, a power pack, all the leads, a HDMI cable, three pads, and a blue Adidas velcro-strip side bag.
It didn't really take us too long to piece together what had happened. During one of Q's previous random visits, he'd obviously swiped Helen's keys while everybody was either out of the room or looking another way. Logan recalled that earlier in the day, Q had been outside, ringing the doorbell and shouting to see if anyone was in. Logan didn't trust him or like him too much, and couldn't be arsed getting out of bed to answer. When Logan had gone to college, leaving the house empty as Jack and I were at work, Q must have let himself in with Helen's keys, quickly bundled the Xbox 360 and its related paraphenalia into the bag, and scarpered back to his house. A quick visit to his house let us know that Q's mom and brother had seen him leaving the house about half an hour previously, with a bag neither of them recognised that matched the description of Logan's missing bag - so, three guesses what was inside that?
The police were duly called, and at first we were fairly hopeful that we might have some chance of recovering the console - he hadn't had chance to get too far with it, after all. However, it took the police six hours to arrive after the call - apparently, someone having pilfered the keys to someone else's house and using the purloined keys to let themselves in to steal shit isn't a priority case. They must have had motorists to repeatedly kick in the balls, or pensioners to jail for missing a council tax payment, or something. When they finally did turn up, they warned us not to expect to get the Xbox back, since it had probably already been sold on. We had already figured as much, seeing as Q had, thanks to the police, had a six-hour head-start rather than a 30-minute one. Nice work, Holmes and Watson!
So now, we've got to go to the expense of changing the front door locks, since Q presumably still has Helen's keys, and may even have cut copies. Which is a bastard, because we already have unpaid bills and bank charges due to account foul-ups and delays. Logan is in mourning for his Xbox, and we're all out of pocket and pissed off. So yeah, the mood in Casa Del Dill isn't particularly bouyant right now.
