Tuesday 31 July 2007

Stealing great big chunks of your heart

Taking a little piece of your heart; that's what some folks specialise in. They develop a career to ensure daily unhappiness, grief and upset. There is nothing of the saving grace of Robin Hood about them. They raid a home, remove any and every item associated with love, friendship and years of toil and then scatter them to the four winds in their greed and vileness.
There are burglars in the area. They have temporarily destroyed the happiness of my neighbour. They have done over another neighbour and no doubt they are on the prowl planning grief to the next in line, possibly me. I worry most for my two big beautiful dogs. They have deep growls and are wonderfully alert to strange noises and people. Although this is a serious bad man deterrent it also makes them targets for destruction and even the prospect of this makes me gulp with anger and fear and turns me into an adrenalin fuelled Mother tiger.
The police appear to be taking the burglaries seriously, but I'm not sure what they can do without a big piece of luck in being at the right place at the right time; no easy feat in such a sparsely populated part of the world. Let's hope the bastard burglars are clumsy and have left a heap of forensic evidence.
But I do roll my eyes when one of the local towns, with perhaps the lowest crime rate in the country, wants to install people stalking kit. The mayor for West Devon is quoted as saying "there are one or two people who are against CCTV, but there are equal numbers for it, as well as a silent majority who we presume have no problem with it." I will refrain from much comment, but he really does presume, doesn't he?
If and when they catch the bastard burglars, I suggest we resurrect the
stocks and pelt them with rotten cabbages. A cruel and unusual punishment fitting, I feel, to the crime.

Thanks to The Policeman's Blog for the police dog video.

7 comments:

Arthur Clewley said...

ah yes, the 'silent majority' so often quoted by politicians, otherwise known as 'the majority who we'll keep in the dark because they are too busy working and living their lives to find out what we're up to untill it's too late so we can do what we bloody well please and if they don't actually object we can assume they agree with us'.

We have CCTV in our town, also a small quiet market town. I don't know what crime it prevents but it didn't prevent a teenage girl going missing in 2005, it didn't prevent the police taking two years to charge someone with her murder and it didn't prevent her body remaining undiscovered to this day. It doesn't prevent the more day to day argy bargy either, which simply moves out of view of the cameras. CCTV is utterly useless in preventing crime, largely useless in solving it unless the perpetrator didn't notice he was in view of it, and really seems to serve only to produce clips to sell to 'police camera action' type TV shows

Flowerpot said...

Let's hope they catch the bastards very soon, Mopsa. Take care and I do hope your dogs (and other animals) are safe.

mountainear said...

Hear hear FP.

Otherwise cynicism reigns.

Re CCTV - for us, on the plus side it found the next of kin of a young man found drowned in the canal by tracking back his movements around a city centre to a cash machine and thence a name....but - and less serious this - proved utterly redundant when my son's bike was nicked outside M&S in Manchester, under the beady eye of 2 cameras.

Here in Welshpool I suspect it just shows amusing footage of the Poles v. proles fisticuffs. (Did I just say that? how unPC of me?)

Mutterings and Meanderings said...

Mopsa, I am of the school of thought that if I lived on a farm I would follow the Tony Martin route

After all, they shouldn't be there ...

Anonymous said...

just discovered your blog, interesting. One of my favourite blogs - the Dark Age Blog - is by a Canadian farmer.

hope your dogs are okay. i think because dogs are so quick and ferocious when they want to be, burglars will just avoid dog-guarded properties. i've seen a playfully charging dobermann, and wouldn't feel confident of my chances against the real thing, even with a weapon. i guess poison is the thing to worry about - i think it is possible to train dogs not to accept food except from your hand?

Mopsa said...

Welcome Elberry. Couldn't find the Dark Age blog - several of that title but nothing farm related...

Anonymous said...

ah, it's www.darkage.ca, but he rarely write about farming! it's mainly a critique of our times as decadent and full of bull. Strangely, his best stuff seems written in autumn/winter.