Burnt or Burgled? That is the question that has been vexing the Thompson household over the last month ever since we had our doors and windows replaced. The new door has a double locking facility that if you choose you need a key to unlock it from the inside. My concern with this system has always been that in the event of a fire, with the house thick with smoke, you may not be able to find the key and therefore get burnt to death. Not double locking the door means that in theory it is possible for someone to put a wire through the letter box and open the door and you get burgled. I have always favoured being burgled over being burnt to death and so opted for the single lock approach. Last night, after ten trouble free years in the house, we got burgled along with two other houses in a neighbouring street.

We were fortunate in that our burglars only took Helen’s handbag – amazingly choosing to leave the laptop behind which was on the table next to it. One of the other houses had their car taken – we only lost keys, a variety of credit/charge cards and Helen’s phone.

So today has been spent dealing with the police/insurance company, cancelling cards, getting locks changed etc. something that has cost us £200 and a bit of inconvenience. But what have the thieves got? A handful of cancelled cards, a set of keys for a doors that have had their locks changed and a mobile phone worth 70 quid new. We even had the last laugh on that as the phone was flat they couldn’t use it to drain it’s £10 credit before we told the phone company. So was it really worth it for them to invade our privacy?

One thing that has impressed me in all of this is how well everyone and in particular the police have reacted to this. Helen and the boys were on their own when this happened as I was away on business – this obviously made the whole thing much more stressful for Helen and the police dealt with it all very sympathetically, efficiently and quickly. And for a brief 30mins this morning our house became a crime scene with finger prints taken and a photographs shot of the rather large footprint left by our night time callers on one of our chairs.

One other consequence of the burglary is that we will now be double locking the doors and so we have bought extra smoke detectors. If there is a fire we will be leaving by the windows!

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