plasticbag.org

Without a DVD player, I’ve been reduced to watching episode after episode of Buffy on video. So I’m in my flat with the lights off and all the windows closed when I hear a noise outside. And yet again, I’m immediately up at my windows, scouring the darkness outside – expecting at any moment for a face to loom up in front of me, trying to get into my home. I wander around the flat checking all the windows and turning lights on so I can check the room, then turning them off so I can see outside more easily. It’s about twenty minutes before I can sit down again…

Well I’m planning to work from home this morning, and make a stab at getting into town around lunchtime. But if you want to experience the full London going-to-work experience, then why not follow my bus route with me through the medium of cams?

• Outside my flat is a bus stop. I get the number six. It travels down towards Warwick Avenue, curls eastwards, and then turns right onto…
• Edgware Road – Oh joy. The wonders of the traffic jams on Edgware Road. I love you so much. Often people walk past the bus. Often people get off the bus to walk instead, and try and catch up with other buses further down the road. This stage normally doesn’t last long and the traffic really speeds up by the time I reach…
• Marble Arch – Turning eastwards again by the Tyburn – the Turkish restaurants of Edgware Road behind me, the wonders of Oxford Street in front of me – what more of a life could any man want. It’s just such a shame that I have to get off at…
• Regent’s Street – Damn you, Number Six. Why oh why must you turn right onto Regent’s Street – forcing me to get out of you at John Lewis and bounce onto any passing 98 or 8 bus. That is, of course, if there are any buses. Because otherwise I end up walking towards…
• Centrepoint – where Oxford Street turns into New Oxford Street. I used to work just around the corner from here at Time Out. Now I work slightly further up the road towards…
• Holborn tube – at Holborn tube, my bus would have gone slightly too far. But this is where I get my weird soya milk, wheatgerm, banana and spirulina smoothies each and every day… They’re a lurid green colour. Score.

So today is the second tube strike in London in a week. As of 8.30pm last night, the Tubes shut down, and they won’t reopen until tomorrow morning. This leaves cars, cabs and buses as the only options for getting into the centre of town. And of course they’re completely overwhelmed with extra demand. Getting into Central London today is essentially a waste of time. If you don’t believe me, then read the BBC strike survival guide or wander through a huge list of London traffic web-cams.

You think you’re fine with everything until you wake up at 4am convinced there’s someone in your flat again. Last night I went to bed at a reasonable hour with all the windows in the house closed and locked. All but one – the tiny one in the kitchen which no one could fit through which gets rid of the smell of unwashed dishes. But that didn’t stop me waking up with a start at 4am convinced that there was someone in the flat. And I wasn’t comforted by looking out all of the windows, walking through all the rooms and turning on most of the lights. This is going to take longer than I’d thought…

When the crime-scene investigors arrived, it was like a real-life TV show. Just like on the show there was a man and a woman. They had a certain banter going between them. They had boxes within boxes of powders, tapes, plastic-sheets and cutting equipment. They looked at each and every handprint. They covered my windows and window-frames in powders and pulled off fingerprints with strips of rigid sticky-tape.

The whole experience was strangely reassuring. The woman laughed with glee a number of times at the stupidity of my burglar. From within the flat alone she managed to get distinct fingerprints for each and every one of his fingers on both hands. She also managed to get a clean shoe-print. And when they saw the drainpipe that they’d climbed up, she sounded so astonished and triumphant at the sheer number of clear prints she found that I couldn’t help but feel better about the whole thing. Now all I have to do is clean the whole flat from top to bottom and find some way of buying some new stuff that doesn’t involve having a large insurance pay-off (I have no contents insurance at the moment).

Find out more about Crime Scene Investigation and Forensic Science:

• FBI Handbook of Forensic Services
• Death Investigation: A Guide for the Scene Investigator
• Becoming a Crime Scene Investigator (US)
• The Forensic Science Society (UK)
• International Crime Scene Investigators Association

I left for Simon and Adele’s wedding on Saturday morning, and had a quite extraordinary time. I’m not going to go into too many details, except to say that it was the first part-goth wedding I’d been to, and I met some really nice and interesting people. The most bizarre aspect of the whole day was probably that I sat next to a charming woman called Joh at the dinner and we got on really well. It wasn’t until I got home that I realised that she had a weblog – and moreover a weblog that linked to me! But she didn’t recognise me, it seems, because she refers to me in her post about the event as ‘Some-Bloke Tom’. It’s a small blogging world.

But of course in the back of my mind the whole time was my flat and the break-in. Would I notice that anything else had gone missing when I returned? How would I feel about the place generally – would I feel safe? Had the guy returned while I was out? Would he?

The most horrible part of the day was when I returned home. When I got back to London I seemed to find an almost infinite amount of ways to avoid coming back to my flat. And when I did I was shaking. I was surprised by the strength of my reaction. Over the weekend I’d sifted through all the things that the police had said to me – in particular that the burglar may have returned several times over the night. And when I got home I noticed that the dirty hand-prints that described the passage of the thief through my flat went right up to my open bedroom door. Not only did he know I was here, but he’d seen me sleeping. He’d been in my bedroom. And he still proceeded to quietly return to the sitting room and work his way through my personal belongings.

The fingerprint people are supposed to arrive sometime this morning, and I’ve had a phonecall from the police asking if I’d come in and look through some photographs. But it’s forty-eight hours since I last saw the guy. I don’t know if any identification I could make would be even vaguely accurate. I felt weird enough as it was driving around the streets, being directed to stare at every young black man we passed. I don’t know if I could live with myself if I made a false identification…

While I was at the wedding a friend of mine said that he has at the front of his address book the words, “Don’t phone home for sympathy”. He said that it was the role of parents to be angry at you for anything that happened. It would always be your fault. But I felt unsafe in my own flat by myself, so I needed to talk to someone. My mother’s first reaction was exactly what I expected. She said I was a twit for leaving the window even slightly open. But she calmed down after that, and after a long conversation, I think I actually felt slightly better about everything…

[This post was written on Saturday 28th September 2002 in a notepad on a train to Huntingdon, following the break-in at my flat in London, and transcribed onto plasticbag.org the following afternoon.]

It’s not been an easy week. I suppose that’s what I should start by saying. It’s not been an easy week. I didn’t expect the man in my flat. I didn’t expect some other stuff either. But mostly it was the man in my flat that threw me.

I’m going to a wedding. Maybe that’s where I should start. Simon is marrying Adele. I’ve known Simon since I was sixteen. We met at school. And he’s getting married in Bury St Edmunds. Today (Saturday) in fact.

Typically I’ve not been very organised. It wasn’t until Wednesday that I’d organised a hotel. And it wasn’t until yesterday that I knew what train I would be taking. And only last night did it occur to me that my suit needed cleaning. And it was quite late in the evening before I finally twigged that my late-night dry-cleaners weren’t going to have enough time to get it clean before they closed.

Old faithful memory came to the rescue with an epic scheme – I would fill the bath with hot water, hang the trousers above it and close the bathroom door. The magic of steam wouldn’t clean them, of course, but it might get the creases out. And so it did. But it left them slightly damp.

My flat is small and kind of hectic and I live on the first floor. For the Americans amongst us, who don’t know the concept of ‘ground floors’, you should read that as, “I live on the second floor”. So to help my trousers dry a little, I opened a window a couple of inches to let a bit of a breeze in. And then I went to bed.

To get to Huntingdon this morning, I had to get up fairly early. So I set my alarm for seven-thirty. But for some reason I woke up before that – just before seven in fact. And I knew immediately that there was something wrong. I could hear noises and I was surprisingly cold. My first reaction was that there was someone in my flat – but how often do you get that kind of momentary paranoid thought when there’s really noone there? A noise, some wind – or maybe a book falling over or some paper rustling. You don’t take it seriously if you’re an adult. I turned over and tried to get some more rest.

But it was no good. I was nervous and I didn’t know why. I turned on the TV in my bedroom and caught some news, and then pulling on a towel I got up and wandered into the sitting room.

And there was a man in it – almost halfway out of the window wearing a blue baseball cap, a two-tone blue hooded fleece, dark skin, startled eyes and my DVD player under his arm.

He bounded down from the window and sprinted around to the road at the front of my building. I pull open the front door and chased him into the street – barefoot, wearing a towel at seven in the morning. But he was too fast and was wearing proper shoes. A man with a van nearby told me to get in and we chased him. He’d abandoned the players somewhere and was walking calmly down a nearby street. Jumping out of the van, I ran after him, but he turned a corner and when I got there he had gone.

I’m writing this on a train to Huntingdon, and I’ll type it up when I get home tomorrow. Around me are hills and countryside – England at its best. It’s a beautiful morning. I’ve spend over an hour talking to the police and driving around West London estates with an officer, trying to identify the guy. He was nowhere to be seen. I’ve lost my DVD player and my new X-box. And worst of all he stole the camera that all my friends clubbed together to buy me for my thirtieth birthday has been taken as well. That he’s managed to spoil that memory for me – even a little – is more upsetting than almost everything else.

He left some dirty handprints on the window frame. He got his hands dirty climbing up the drainpipe. I had to leave there so that they can try and get some fingerprints off them sometime in the next couple of days. Then I can start trying to scrub them off. But I think that even if I get rid of all visible traces, that mark of vulnerability that he’s left on my home will remain for a long time to come.

I spent a little time trawling through plasticbag.org‘s archive this morning, and came upon this post, which I think has to be one of the best things I’ve ever written:

Time and need are connected in some strange extravagant way with one another. The more desire you feel, the longer seems the time you have to wait to see it fulfilled. The harder you exert a pull, the further you seem to have to strain. Relationships between people can be measured by their perceptions of time. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” he cries. “I seem to see him all the time,” she complains.

I was woken by a tiny trollish man this morning, regailing me with stories of how his ‘cubby hole’ was flooded by something emerging from my flat. I stood there dressed in nothing but a towel on with my head all clumpy and slow while he insisted that I must have just had a bath. I should be grateful really – he woke me from one of the most unpleasant dreams I’ve ever had.

I was in a place that resembled a huge, brightly lit locker room. It was as if they’d removed the gym from the building and made it all into a locker room. Some of the walls had mirrors on them. I was there for a shower of some kind. A huge institutional-looking man led me to my locker, which was a strange shape – deep and wide, but only about three inches high – and in it was were two packages that looked like they contained the towels you get at Chinese restaurants to freshen up with after eating. I didn’t know what to do with them initially, but under the steady, relentless gaze of the institutional man, I gradually I came to understand that one of these towels was saturated with some kind of soapy chemical substance, and the other removed it. You were expected to strip naked, rub yourself down with it and then use the other one to ‘rinse’ yourself. The institutional man said that sometimes the first part of the body that you touched with the towel sometimes reacted badly with the chemicals and would swell up – and he recommended using it on my chest as that would be less noticeable or dangerous. He did this bluntly – aggressively – like I didn’t really have much in the way of choice. I stripped off, took the towel and started wiping myself with it, but immediately started to feel strange and dizzy. Walking to a mirror I saw that some parts of my skin had ruptured under the pressure of the chemical towel – particularly on the side of my body – and that I was slowly become covered with substantial bleeding holes. And that’s when I woke up, with a weird troll-like man lurking outside my door, obsessed with flooding. What a way to start the day…

In unrelated news, Alan Storm has informed me that being bitten by a purple fly can turn Smurf’s purple. Note – this is very definitely not the same process as normal bruising.