Friday night was a fairly normal affair. I'd been down to the Paddington office for the weekly Friday drinks, headed into the winebar for a few more and then ended up drinking with a few colleagues in bars around Covent Garden.
Usually I don't end up in Covent Garden, it's true, but invariably my plan to leave after a few drinks and head off home for the evening goes awry and ends with me getting home late drunk with kebab meat and chips in hand.
On this occasion, the choice between waiting in the rain for a bus with takeaway in hand and getting straight on the bus that had arrived outside the tube station just as I exited had resulted in me going home hungry.
When I reached the front door, all was quiet. I put the key in the front door and in that familiar drunken way my leaning on the door as I turned the key caused me to stumble slightly through the doorway.
Unusually the light was on in the hallway, and I could see that the door to the flat downstairs was damaged, quite badly. I thought this looked quite bad, but was relieved to see that my own door was intact.
Entering the flat, I resolved that it might be wise to lock the deadlock which usually would only be locked if nobody was in. I attempted to poke the key in the direction of the door.
The first time the key didn't go in, I didn't think anything of it, I was drunk afterall and it wasn't unusual that my hand eye co-ordination was affected by drunkenness. I could say something really self-deprecating but filthy here but, I won't.
The second time the key didn't go in, then a third time. It was at this point that my eyes focussed on the door enough to realise that it was not my door! I was in the right flat but it definitely was not the same door that I locked behind me when I left the flat earlier that day.
Shit!
Running upstairs, I looked into the lounge, it still looked tidy, and saw that though all the plugs were out of the sockets, the DVD, the video recorder (yes I still have one of those) and the TV were still there.
Why would you break into a flat and not take them? None of the items would be worth much, but you wouldn't break into a house and not take anything just because they're worthless. Then it dawned on me.
Shit! My laptop!
Not my old one that doesn't even have a CD Rom drive, my new-ish super duper pride and joy of a laptop. The one I've been using to create enhanced video clips complete with dodgy special effects that I've been cluttering up YouTube with.
I ran into my room, it was a mess, as usual and my eyes darted across the room to where my laptop had been only to see a laptop sized patch of carpet.
Disaster! I then looked at my bed and the clutter of junk I had inhabiting the still unused right hand side of my bed and noticed that my digital camera was not where it should be. Even more disaster!
I stepped into the hallway mumbling to myself, "what the fuck!"
My flatmate called down from her room. "Gordon, we've been burgled!"
"I know", I replied, "Are you ok?" I added
"yeah, they took my new mobile phone. They didn't take my laptop, the screen is scratched. The people downstairs got it worst"
"bummer. I'd had a really good evening, I'm drunk and I was looking forward to some food, but now…. They took my laptop and digital camera. At least they didn't trash the place"
"Do you want the crime number so you can call the police to tell them what you had stolen?"
"nah, it can wait til the morning……what a bummer", I said and ambled back into my room and looked around, just hoping that by some miracle, my laptop hadn't been stolen. But it had.
It was then that I realised that the mess of bank and credit card statements that had been tidied (read shoved in the drawer beside my bed) away a week earlier was now back besides my bed on the floor. It didn't look like anything obvious had gone but then I remembered. I'd had a new credit card sent to me a week or two earlier that I hadn't bothered to detach from the covering letter yet.
I looked for it, but it was gone. I pulled out my cellphone and called my credit card provider straight away to get the card cancelled.
I was quite impressed with myself that despite being drunk I was lucid enough to not just to think to check to see if my credit card had gone but then to get straight onto the credit card company to get it cancelled.
At this point I really needed to talk to someone. I'd lost my laptop and it wasn't just that, it was all the files and all the stuff I'd filmed over the past few months that I had got around to dealing with that had gone. I had disks of some stuff that I'd archived away but not all of it.
So I phoned a friend, it was almost 2am(sorry dude!) but I couldn't go to sleep with all this in my head plus I was very drunk so I wasn't thinking totally straight. After what I think was ten minute long conversation of me drunkenly moaning that it wasn't fair. I was in the right frame of mind to get some sleep, not that I wouldn't have dropped off to sleep immediately due to the amount of beer that had been consumed, so I got into bed and slept.
When I woke up feeling slightly hungover at 8.30am, though the first thing that popped into my head was the reminder that the burglary had occurred I was feeling surprisingly cheerful. We had been burgled, but not much had been taken, my record collection was untouched and the place was still tidy or as tidy as it usually was.
I climbed out of bed and looked on my bedside unit and staring up at me was my credit card. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. My laptop and camera had been stolen, I wasn't insured and I'd lost a significant chunk of my archives, but I felt good.
Later that morning, when my flatmate got up and we talked about the burglary I was quite animated and would even say I was excited by the whole thing. I wouldn't say that I don't get on with my flatmate but I wouldn't say we were exactly friends either. We don't really have much to talk about other than stuff to do with the flat and the weather. But we actually had something interesting to talk about!
We were both, in a peverse way, impressed that other than the door being kicked to pieces and a drawer or two of paper emptied on the floor which easily be put back in the drawers, they hadn't trashed the place and appeared to have quite consciously cherry picked a few items to take.
Later in the morning, we had a knock on the door. It was the people from the flat downstairs who had knocked just to let us know that they were getting a dead lock put onto the front door and would be getting us keys for it.
Just like myself and my flatmate. They were also quite pleased or maybe just relieved that the burglars had taken just a few things , left much of their most expensive stuff and not left a mess. Amongst their stolen items was an expensive mp3 player that hadn't been working properly and being insured the man downstairs was chuffed that he would be able to replace it with one that worked properly.
"sorry, I don't know your name?", he said
"I'm Gordon", I replied
"I'm John and this is Laura", he said
"Nice to finally meet you!", I smiled
In the year or so since they had moved into the flat downstairs, neither me or my flatmate had exchanged much more than a rare passing hello. In fact, I see more of their cats than them. Usually outside the bathroom window crying at me, through the frosted glass. It can be so off putting sometimes.
It seems to be common nowadays, that people don't know their neighbours, what there names are or even what they look like. It takes a burglary for you to find out who they are or whether they are nice people or not and I find that quite sad.
Two days on, Laura has now asked my flatmate if she can feed their cats, when they go on holiday later this year. My flatmate loves cats and I know is really pleased that they have asked her. Had it not been for the burglary, they would never have even thought to ask. Silver linings and all that. Now, if only I could get an invite to watch their Sky Sports…………….
Since the burglary, I've looked into replacing the stuff I had stolen with mixed results. With my digital camera, I nearly bought a new one on Saturday morning, but in my quest to get an identical one to the one I had lost, I have found a used one on eBay for a fraction of the cost of a new one. It might be a while til I can afford a new laptop though.
What amuses me most about the whole burglary affair, in a ironic way, was that on the day of the burglary, when I left the flat in the morning, I had an album by the Dammed on my discman and the first song on that album? …………………….Burglar :)
