Outrage Perpetrated Against Venial Sinner!

They came in through the window. At first glance the only sign that there had been anybody there at all was my absent laptop and an upturned house plant smashed on the floor beneath their entrance point. A more thorough search revealed that they had made their gettaway additionally burdened by my digital camera and, rather ludicrously, around £50 in copper that the Pink Psychiatrist and I had been hoarding in our respective boudoirs. My initial reaction to this outrage: that same flat dysphoria that I had felt all those years ago in a back street of Camberwell after a particularly comical knife-point mugging. None of this wild, inconsolable grief; no murderous bloodlust for vengence; not even a whimpering exclamation of indignation: just a simple, recognizant "oh." and the immediate desire to have done with the whole inconevient business of reporting it before I'd even begun.

The police were very efficient. I wasn't even sure if one called 999 for this sort of thing; it didn't particularly seem to be that much of an emergency, to be frank. Two genial officers of the law arrived promptly and managed, to their credit, a half-decent job of suppressing their what-do-you-expect smiles as they catalogued our stupidity: door not dead-locked; window left ajar; alarm not set; possessions not insured. I thought perhaps I might lighten the uncomfortablely official atmosphere by assuring them with a wry smile that now that the horse had bolted I would definately ensure that the stable door was not only closed but dead locked and alarmed as well. This went down life a pork chop at a bar mitzvah and I decided the simple facts would probably be best.

Later some lady turned up with what looked suspiciously like her personal make-up kit to dust things for prints and the like. I showed her in and left her in peace to get on with this little exercise in futility whilst I consulted the Daily Fascist, er I mean Mail, to put together my own photofit of the criminal at large. I learnt firstly that it was undoubtedly young and a he. Young because - as any decent, tax-paying, Daily Mail reader knows - the younth of today are, without exception, a riotous bunch of amoral ruffians who trawl the streets in hoods looking for old grannies to rape or war veterans to disrespect. They don't even speak proper English, but some incomprehensible pidgen called 'txt'. It must have been a he because the female-species of criminel - a.k.a. the single mother in Daily Mail speak - is known to keep her pecuniary trespasses on a State-wide, rather than a personnal, level in the form of benefit fraud...or even just benifits full stop. He will undoubtedly be involved in drugs, perhaps even the really hard stuff like cannabis, which we know will turn even the most proper of individuals into ravernous, robbing rapists at the slightest whiff. Worse still he is probably an illegal immigrant that has escaped from one of those nice holiday camps by the sea that those moaning, woolly liberals keep stupidly comparing to prisons! As for the colour of his skin, it's more difficult to be sure these days. Time was you could be almost certain that it would have been black; these days one discerns a certain lighter, more olive hue to the modern ne'er-do-well. Satorially, this criminal master of disguises has swapped his overly-baggy jeans and visible underpants for a beard and turban. Lord knows, he may even have a had a hook for a hand to help him scale the wall to the window! If only that poor forensics lady knew about the Daily Mail Bureau for Criminal Statistics, she could have saved herself a whole lot of time and powder by immediately arresting the man below.

Of course, all this still leaves the The Venial Sinner sans computer and, thus, sans means of updating this literary opus of mine. Somehow, however, I think the world might just manage without me...