Month: September 2002

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.

…and the winner is ScaryDuck. For those of you who came in late, the Guardian have finally announced the winners of the Best British Blog competition. Congratulations to everyone who was shortlisted – particularly the winner Scary Duck and my particular favourites: LinkMachineGo, Anglepoised, Blogjam, Gina Snowdoll, Interconnected and Minor9th. Over at Metafilter there’s a thread to discuss the resutls, where I promise – I will try to behave. And if you want to explore the range of weblogs that didn’t enter (and some of their reasons for not doing so), then you should investigate The “Not the Best” Project.

As those of you who aren’t reading this site through the medium of NetNewsWire have probably already noticed, plasticbag.org has gone through a bit of a redesign. This one, for perhaps obvious reasons, is called kottkesque and is pure CSS once more. Unfortunately, despite me having worked on it for the last eight hours, it’s 2am and it’s still incomplete. I decided – against my better judgement – to do quite a lot of the building on this one while the site was live, because I hoped I’d work faster and get the damn thing done. And that has mostly worked.

Known bugs at this stage include:

• Form elements on the top right of the page don’t sit right on the page on most Windows browsers.
• Sometimes links in comments and in list elements aren’t formatted correctly.
• There is no gallery section yet, merely an empty directory listing with some old-style pages within it.
• There are no permalinks yet (this is a difficult one to fix, but I’ll see if I can enlist Cal).
• The links use a border property in CSS rather than the normal text-decoration – and as such don’t appear as intended in some earlier Window’s browsers. This will be fixed shortly.
• The search results page is still formatted in the site’s old style.

If you’ve noticed any errors on the pages that aren’t part of the above list, then mail me (including details of the error and a screen-cap if possible) and I’ll endeavour to sort them out as quickly as is humanly possible – ideally within the next twenty-four hours. I know this isn’t the most professional of behaviours, but hell – it’s my personal site, I can do what the hell I like. I’ll also be undertaking some general tweaking over the next few days, as well as (hopefully) putting up a gallery of screenshots from previous incarnations of the site. If you’re one of the people who found the old site unmanageable, then welcome back. And if you hate it and it makes you cross, then find someone who you don’t like in real life and give them an earful on my behalf. I’m off to bed. Good night!

So Buffy returns with its seventh, and potentially last, series. And as usual Americans will see it now, people with cable or satellite in the UK will see it in January, and the rest of us will have to wait until the box sets come out or it comes on terrestrial. Which will probably be (at the earliest) next August. In the meantime, the only scraps of information that we can get over this side of the pond are stories on sites like Whedonesque. It’s a cruel, cruel world we live in…

I hereby declare my intention to read through the British Government’s much promised dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is freely available from a number of different governmental and non-governmental sites. [Download the PDF (428kb)] This document is supposed to clarify why some kind of action against Saddam Hussein is of the utmost importance. However, I’m about a third of the way through John Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World, and am increasingly suspicious of Governmental motivations (both in the US and UK) with regard to this conflict. I’ve downloaded the document, and will be posting my ill-educated and worthless opinions of it as I proceed.

Foreword: The document starts with a two page foreword by Tony Blair which details the particularly unusual circumstances surrounding the release of the document. He states that the document is based on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The material it collects is normally secret, and it is apparently “unprecedented for the Government to publish this kind of document”. The introduction further states that Mr Blair believes that it demonstrates without doubt that Saddam Hussein (referred to regularly as simply “Saddam”, which seems odd to me – as if he’d refer to the US’s government as “George”) has continued to build weapons of mass destruction. But he also states:

“I believe people will understand why the Agencies cannot be specific about the sources, which have formed the judgements in this document, and why we cannot publish everything we know. We cannot, of course, publish the detailed raw intelligence.”

This is both totally expected, and utterly frustrating. Because at heart it leaves the document as inevitably a set of assertions. Assertions presented without substantial back-up or evidence. And although of course everyone understands why such information can’t easily be published, it unfortunately leaves the door open for doubt and suspician over its validity.

Finally, a comparison from the introduction. Tony Blair: “Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people.” American researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller (from Pilger’s book): “Economic sanctions have probably already taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history.”

From the Executive Summary: When it comes to summarising the position of the document, the Executive Summary is brief, clear and startling reading. Whether or not it accurately represents the situation is of course inevitably a matter of faith in the legitimacy and accountability of our leaders. If it is accurate, then it is fairly chilling. The first three points detail what presumably amounts to previously public information about Iraq’s continued development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The fourth point outlines what are perceived to be his attitudes towards these weapons, while the fifth asserts there is evidence that the regime is covering up new developments in them.

The sixth is the most startling point. It outlines a set of judgements or predictions about Iraq, which include that they have a wide range of protocols, mechanisms and military arrangements for the use of chemical and biological agents, developed mobile laboratories, tried covertly to acquire materials for nuclear devices including attempts to get “significant amounts of uranium from Africa”, illegally kept and further developed long-range missiles and learnt how to conceal sensitive equipment and documentation from inspectors.

The seventh point is merely a statement of the source of these judgements, the eighth a statement that Iraq are breaking the law, the ninth a statement that declares the risks of keeping Hussein as leader, and the tenth declares that Iraq funds its programs via illegal activity with an income of $3 billion in 2001.