Alarming Cars!

I don’t see the point to car alarms?!

Nobody pays any attention to them, they go off if the slightest gust of wind throws a leaf on the windscreen and they are thoroughly annoying!

Take last Saturday night for example. I was out the front of my house and just down the road there was a damned car alarm going off. I tutted and thought to myself ‘is anyone going to actually turn that thing off?’ It simply didn’t occur to me that the car might actually be being stolen!

Surely the point to the car alarm is to alert us that the car is being tampered with, that someone is about to steal it and to give us the nudge to take note of what we see and ring the police. That all sounds great except they don’t anymore. They just irritate!

Too many times have they gone off with no reason and too many times has it disturbed our sleep or driven us crazy while we wait for the owners to come along and turn them off. They are simply pointless… Or are they?

So this car alarm was going off and as I put my keys in the front door, wondering if anyone was going to turn it off, I glanced down the road to said alarming car. There was a man standing half inside the car and half out with both front doors wide open. He was calmly chatting to another man on the other side of the road and didn’t seem in the slightest bit concerned about turning his alarm off. He wasn’t stealing the car, I mean who would do that so calmly, no it was definitely his but he just wasn’t turning the thing off and continued to have his chat over the roof of it. How annoying!

Other people were walking past and staring at them presumably thinking the same thing and then I went in my house grumbling at the annoyance of it all and thought no more of it.

At midnight the police knocked on our door. Apparently the house opposite us was burgled between 8 and 9pm and they wanted to know if we’d seen anything? No? No, we honestly hadn’t. Despite being outside, directly opposite the burgled house at the time it was being burgled by burglars who got in through the FRONT door, we didn’t see a thing!

All I had been concerned about was the car alarm and the two men having their calm little chat over it and not bothering to turn the alarm off!

And then it dawned. The men having the chat with the car going WAAAAWAAAAWAAAAWAAAA were actually accomplices in the robbery. Their job, or that of the car alarm rather, was to distract from the house their pals were raiding… Clever! Bloody cheek of them but clever eh!

There’s been a spate of burglaries in the area and this is their trick… So, car alarms DO have a point. If you’re a burglar.

I’m not going to ignore them from now on of course.

They’re still flipping annoying though!

MY LIFE WITH TWO!

This week I went to an event where I had to fly up to Manchester! I went with friends and we made a real day of it which was lots of fun. My Mum came down to look after the children for me and they had a ball with her as normal because she’s so lovely with them, I don’t think they missed me at all! I went out at 6am before Florence got up and didn’t get home until 9pm after she’d gone to bed (obviously Jimmy was up either end – that boy never sleeps it seems) which has never happened before and makes me very grateful that I am not a regular working Mummy! I enjoyed our jaunt as a special but I couldn’t do it every day!

The rest of the week has been quiet but fun and it started with a trip to the Science Museum (again) which neither the children nor I can get enough of. If we move back to Norwich as Jonny and I are talking about then this will be one of the places we miss the most! Then the week has ended with Jimmy and I trotting off to Norwich despite the tube strike to join my Mum and Florence who went back a day before us! A lovely weekend at home awaits!

I still call Norwich home… Perhaps that’s another reason to add to the list of pros to move back… I’m torn with this decision I really am but everything is pointing Norfolk bound…