There was a burglary on our street last night. A thief or thieves got into the garden behind Gary and Lynsey's house. There they have a secure shed where Gary keeps his bicycles or should I say - he used to keep his bicycles. They have both gone now.
As you know, modern bicycles can cost an awful lot of money whether they are mountain bikes, racing bikes or partly electrified. For the price of a new bicycle you could easily cover the cost of a Mediterranean package holiday - say in Cyprus, southern Spain or perhaps Sicily!
Co-incidentally, about ten days ago building improvement work began on Gary and Lynsey's house. They are having an extension. The builders put a big plywood gate at the side of the house because they have work equipment that they want to keep as safe as possible. It seems that the dirty rotten no-good thieves bust the padlock on that temporary gate to access the back garden and the shed.
It's hard not draw the conclusion that there is some kind of link between the building work and the robbery. I am not suggesting that the builders were in any way responsible but they get stuff delivered and how would the perpetrators of the crime even know that there were two expensive bikes in that shed?
Burglaries are very upsetting for law-abiding homeowners but at least on this occasion the guilty scumbags did not enter the house. Lynsey is about to give birth to their second son - he is due any day now. The last thing she needed was the upset that this has caused.
I am pleased to say that in our forty two years of home ownership, we have never been burgled. The worst that has happened is that when we owned a Ford Focus it was broken into three times in a year. Each time they were after the car radio/CD player. They would smash the side window to gain access and when they did this on the third occasion there was no radio/CD player in the slot. I guess they didn't bother looking.
We are pretty sure that our thieves were teenage boys. Shirley almost caught them one night when she went out to the wheelie bins in her house slippers. On more than one evening I grabbed a heavy torch and patrolled the neighbourhood on the lookout for these rats and for months afterwards we were forever looking up and down the street and listening for ominous sounds. It was unsettling.
Though the Ford Focus was a great car, I was kind of glad when I got rid of it. All over the kingdom they were being broken into for their radio/CD players but at the time Ford sought to downplay the issue. In the mid-nineties, it was rumoured that Ford sound systems could be easily adapted to become satellite TV receivers.
Have you or any of your nearest and dearest been the victims of burglars?
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/wuUERB6