“The only thing worth stealing…”

Last night, my parents, my youngest sister and I went out to a restaurant for my sister’s birthday anniversary. She had come up from London for a couple of weeks, you see. We had some fun, then went to my other sister’s house to play with her son, and have a cuppa. When we returned home I went into the kitchen and noticed that the back door was open.

My father started shouting that someone had left it open, even though I had seen him walk out of the kitchen, and he very meticulously checks that all windows and doors remain locked prior to leaving his house. As my sister went to close the door, I suddenly saw that the lock outside had snapped off.

“We’ve been robbed!” I yelled, and ran back to the main room: TV and video still intact. Hmmm… Strange. I pegged it into the sitting room: computer and monitor still there. Nothing touched. Strange. Then I went upstairs.

There it was. My parents’ room an absolute shambles. They’ve emptied the cupboards and nicked my mum’s jewellery! It’s as if they’d known they’d find something there. Weird thing? My mum had fairly recently taken the jewellery out of the bank in safety deposit box. I know, because I had accompanied her to do it. Turns out the solid, 24–carat gold jewellery amounts to approximately £18,600. With the £845 in cash they also took, they got a motherfucking good haul.

My parents don’t usually have large amounts of cash or jewellery at home, so we suspected something dodgy afoot. The cops, however, don’t seem to think so. They suspect Asian burglars who know that Asians invariably keep jewellery upstairs. We simply happened to have taken that stuff out of the bank at a bad time, sighs abound.

For my mother it all has sentimental value too: she had a lot of the stuff since her wedding (more than 35 years ago now), and wanted to pass items on to my youngest sister when she eventually gets married. My mother felt absolutely distraught. My mind can’t even comprehend that we’ve had close to ￡20,000 stolen from us!

I keep thinking about what my mother must have felt seeing the room in its devastated state. That palpable horror which accompanies the dawning realisation that one of your worst nightmares has come true. For me, I felt impotent rage that some cunting SHIT scumbags could have the audacity to violate the sanctity of their home and steal what took my parents DECADES to build.