Probably not. Certainly the sanctity of your property when faced with the invading hoard of scrotal Aylesbury. Last year, a false alarm left me filling silly and cold after a one man/one cat naked pincer move on the barn. Last Thursday, the 3am alarm call heralded something significantly more nasty.

And different. Firstly I decided to arm myself with more than the shield of justice, the sword of truth and the swinging willy of righteousness. So struggling into jeans while the alarm insisted – at above the pain threshold – that someone was in the barn and all the neighbors were soon to be awake.

Attaining a geographical position of ‘outside‘ was preceded by much flapping of dressing gowns and more general flapping. I traded myopically punching the alarm codes with just punching the unit which proved a whole lot more effective, and launched myself outside brandishing a broom handle and feeble torch.

Even in a state best thought of as upright, but asleep, the security light strobe show clearly chronicled the escape path of a man making good his lack or morals with stolen collateral. I crashed in through the bike side door, swept a fast count of frames, breathed a sigh of relief and incautiously barreled into the office side.

To find the window broken, the blinds flapping and a woody desk space where a laptop used to be*. Within snatching distance were still my Tag watch, wallet and two digital cameras. And of course – a single unlocked door away – all my precious mountain bikes. So the alarm did it’s job even if the window locks didn’t. I was 90 seconds too late to accost the rapscallion who’d taken the whole “property is theft“** thesis to a new level.

The police were great. Two competent blokes turned up 10 minutes later and summoned a sniffer dog. The prowling hound found a trail of scrote through many gardens in the road – ending uselessly at the curb side where a car had been parked. ” Look on the bright side” one of the uniforms said “you weren’t targeted, it was just opportunity crime and after the alarm scare, they won’t be back“.

And yeah, nothing was stolen that can’t be replaced, our house wasn’t violated, the kids were never in danger so maybe we should be grateful. But I’m not, I’m a little irritated with myself for not hiding stuff away, with the ballache of fixing windows and adding another two locks to each opening***, moving stealable stuff inside and securing all the bikes.

Yet that isn’t the primary emotion. It’s sadness that we have to do it. It’s frustration that a locked down laptop with a disk full of encryption is going to fetch£20 at best. Stuff like this chips away at your faith in human nature and that’s just not nice.

Still, it did take my mind off the debacle of the latest bike storage arrangements. Words – for once – fail me.

* on the upside this was the firms’. On the downside, they weren’t delighted I had lost it.

** It goes like this. If all property is theft then it has already been stolen. So all I am doing by nicking stuff is balancing the books and avoiding double counting. Although maybe I’d giving the bloke too much credit, you could conclude he’s just a robbing twat.

*** Anyone wants to break a window is going to need a cannonball. Me too, if I ever want to open one again.

I caught the end of some group therapy TV prog where a roomful of organic bad debts were being encouraged to stop spending what they didn’t have. One credit crunched disaster was singled out for having spent£10,000 on shoes, while another appeared to be single handedly bailing out the entire soft furnishing industry.

Despite Carol’s verbal prodding, I struggled to make any connection to my own spending habits, but in the spirit of house harmony accepted a challenge to record my weekly spending. It is soberingly instructive while turning you into a penny counting meanie with a latent accountancy streak.

And while I accept that stuff – especially in the unique fiscal environment that is robbing London – is ludicrously expensive, life without daily consumerables is kind of miserable.

Allow me to lurch lightly to the right of lunacy. Our coffee run involves a trudge to the local smug Baristas’r’us where I order four drinks and sternly resist all incremental selling of biscuits and flapjacks. 10 minutes later and 10 pounds lighter, I am office bound clutching two normal coffee shaped drinks and something called a skinny cappuccino. With chocolate on top – don’t even ask me to explain that because my final item is a double shot Latte with a vanilla twist created specially for our team metrosexual.

This isn’t New York, it is not even the London office, I am recording real events from bloody Milton Keynes.

“Why can’t we drink normal coffee?” I hear the Microsoft Money’d tutters mutter. Let me say no more than refer you to a previous post on that subject. Nothing has changed except – inexplicably – it has apparently morphed into something even more lethal . And because my taste buds can no longer stomach instant coffee, I’ve been forced to buy my own perky copulator.

We bought a Gaggia so I could back away slowly from the bile and nascent violence of certain forums peopled by those who believe not fridging your coffee beans should invoke a capital offence. An innocent request enquiring upon the best machine for a modest budget ended with the two, er, keenest protagonists threating to kill each other. But, because it’s the Internet, obviously they never left their keyboards but even so… scary.

It came with instructions which – as a bloke hardwired with ‘fuck it, plug it in and see what happens’ DNA – are now illegible after a swift blast on the steamer* launched the milk skywards in the style of a Harrier jump jet. This vertical take off has left an interesting indelible pattern on the ceiling, and accesorised our once black cat with a a sporty stripe.

It took me three strong cups to work it out, by which time I was chugging down Valium in an attempt to stop me wallpapering the entire street.

Anyway you may be unsurprised to hear that my Economy drive lasted exactly two days. The breaking strain of the self imposed fiscal rules was breached by a decision to race off early for a free parking spot, thereby saving myself two pounds. This mad pre-breakfast dash left me no time to prepared any food for the day** – a decision which was to cost me over a tenner come lunchtime.

So our collective decision to try and preserve cash stocks before over fishing renders them extinct has so far seen a purchase of a car, a house*** and a coffee machine. I may as well just buy a new bike and declare myself bankrupt.

World meet Mad. Mad, World.

* Like a milkly fluffer 🙂

** You know when your lunch is trapped in a Tupperware container, middle age is no longer just a number.

*** OK we haven’t. But it’s not through a lack of effort on our part.

I have just had it pointed* out to me that hedgehogs have now been classed as an offensive weapon. This, after an altercation in which a man launched said unwitting mammal at a small boy.

Explaining the attack, in that peculiar language of policemen everywhere, the perpetrator has been charged “for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog“. Only as an adjunct to the story do we find that “It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence“.

The rest of the story – not that there is much more to tell – is here.

And because it is clearly novelty news day, soon self important wankers will be able to bray “I’m on the plane” after the EU scandalously approved the use of mobile phones on aircraft. The last bastion of the drunk and unconnected has been breached by the airlines looking to make a fast buck.

Flying is already as close to hell as any living experience can be without adding several hundred Apprentice-Wannabees shouting the odds.

My future travel plans will involve either a donkey or an underground station. Although ironically I find myself facing 2 hours of short-haul travel on Friday. Pass me that hedgehog.

* Yes, I was striving for a hedgehog related verb**

** No, I didn’t say it was going to be amusing.

Help me out here. One ISP publicly washes its’ hands of monitoring their networks for naughty people stealing music. In a move reminiscent of Pontius Pilot, TalkTalk are playing the “we’re just the conduit card and the security of your digital property is nothing to do with us” card. Okay, well I can sort of accept that especially since the music industry doesn’t seem to be coughing up the requisite greenbacks to fund an army of net-watches.

And yet here we have BT spying on all of our browsing habits in order to target us with specific advertising. That’s the same bloody thing isn’t it? Oh now I see what i missed – one of them costs money and the other one makes it. So it is fuck all to do with ethics, corporate responsibility or even the protection of people’s livelihoods. It’s about making more cash, abusing the privilege of net privacy and applying a moral code forged in the crucible of capitalism.

I would respect TalkTalk’s position more if they’d just ponyed up with “look there is no money in this for us, link it with some advertising revenue and maybe we can do a deal”. As for BT, well they’ve been fucking people over since Mercury had the temerity to target a tiny percentage of their market share. I’d trust Max Mosely over those slippery wankers*.

Loosely related is the Government’s headline splash on a technological solution to pedophiles stalking children on social networking sites. What a masterstroke because anyone who has spent five seconds in the digital age cannot, of course, create a disposable email address. It’s worse than doing nothing because it creates a false sense of security for anyone dumb enough to believe anything these attention seeking worthies put out.

And if we’re talking useless organisations today – after constant chasing – we received “We are not returning your call. The person you need is on holiday. We hope to be able to provide an update next week” from the seller’s solicitors. This is an except copy of the last time they could be bothered to reply, except the date has moved on two weeks. Fax all use frankly, so sadly it looks like Cabbage-Land will not be for us.

Frustrating is not the word. Well it is because I cannot easily convey a digital copy of the noise a head makes repeatedly smacking a keyboard. Let’s try “gfljklsgjklsfhnklhdsjihdsjhjisioas”. That’s what is tattooed on my forehead 🙁

* possibly not an ideal choice of phrase. If what is alleged turns out to be true 😉

Do you remember that homely truism that used to do the rounds on novelty mugs*. You know the one: something needs doing, someone will do it ….. lots of less than humorous play on words …. gets you to nobody doing it**

You don’t? Well let me recount a modern parable that neatly encompasses everything that is wrong with trying to buy a house. Someone wants to buy your house. You want to buy someone else’s house. This other person – allegedly – wants to sell their house. The estate agents want their money. The solicitors want to move at the speed of glacial erosion. The somebody buying your house would like to move in. The somebody selling to you is a useless knucklehead who moves at a pace that makes the solicitors look positively sprightly.

The house you want to buy has covenants, trusts, tax dodges and – for all I know – mortgage capital leveraged on little know moon-rock aggregate market. This is more of a problem because the seller could not find his arse with both hands and a copy of Gray’s anatomy. The solicitors promise little and deliver even less. No one knows what a deadline is. If they looked under an entry for “returning their clients call“, maybe they could work it out.

One person gets angry. Very, very angry. Begins laying about himself with the modern day equivalent of a bloodied spear. I speak of the weapon of mass distraction that is the humble home computer. Most people receive a shrift so short, it could apply for a vertically compromised grant. Words such as ‘useless‘, ‘incompetent‘ and ‘unprofessional’ are oft repeated, honest phrases such as ‘total fuckwits‘ narrowly miss the final edit.

Some people promise action this week. All people lie like a cheap rug. One person draws big bloody line in the sand and declares himself and his family soon to be homeless.

Nobody cares.

We are trying to give someone with something they want to sell a vast amount of money. How sodding hard can it be? We have to sell our house because the last thing we need right now, are our buyers to withdraw their offer through boredom or frustration.

And because we are not some kind of raving bloody nutters, we are making it nice and easy to buy our house. The plethora of solicitors, estate agents and general hangers on add nothing but delay and stupidity. Why can’t I just turn up with a bagful of money and a determined expression?

Apparently every other country does it better. Although, that’s not the boldest of claims when I would consider burglary and squatting a far more reasonable approach that what we’ve been through.

* Come the revolution, the mugs who do novelty shall seamlessly morph into into the screaming humans that do scorpion pits.

** I googled without success for the full text. Clearly I don’t have the mind of the kind of person who would happily hand over real money for a hand crafted RoundTuit.