Posted by:
Soft Machine
(
)
Date: July 15, 2022 05:29AM
Hi everyone,
I've been rather terse on the board for the last three weeks, with only short messages. This is because I have only had one hand available to type (no naughty comments please ;-). That, in turn, is because on Saturday June 25th, I was woken at 6 am by a noise which I assumed to be my daughter trying to open her shutters. I put on my dressing gown and went out of my bedrom... to find a young man to the left of my bedroom door who threatened me with some of our rather pointed secateurs which he'd picked up in the garden on his way to the back, where he'd climbed through a window which we'd left open because of the heat, unfortunately forgetting to close the iron-plate shutters :-/
Luckily, the guy was an amateur and a little bit on the small, lightweight size. He was also not very bright ;-). Upon seeing me, he appears to have thought he was in a gangster film. He told me he had "three friends outside the house in a car who were going to beat me" if I didn't pay them - while also inadvertently telling me where he lived ;-).
Suprisingly calm (and probably still half-asleep ;-), I asked him how much. And that is where his hastily-formulated plan fell apart, because he hadn't thought about that at all. To cover his confusion, he pretended to phone his "accomplices" - but of course, they didn't exist and he was a very bad actor. I quickly understood that he was play-acting, told him so and called out to my daughter and wife to call the police because there was someone in the house. My wife is a very heavy sleeper, but luckily my daughter heard me and called the police, and her movements upstairs alerted him to the presence of other people.
This appeared to annoy him because he hit me twice - once on the right shoulder, hard enough to dislocate it, and then on the nose, sending my spectacles flying. He then pretended to speak to his accomplices again, saying "start the car, start the car" and ran out, taking my mobile phone and my daughter's bag, containing her credit card, passport, etc. It's lucky we no longer have any internal bordersin the EU because she works at the European Commission in Brussels ;-). I listened for a car when he left, but of course there wasn't one ;-).
As a middle-class Englishman, my education means I do not have direct access to my feelings but I think I was pretty shocked because it's taken me three weeks to want to tell you all about it (and I consider most of you to be my friends). I'm better now, but physically my right shoulder is taking a long time to heal and I still frequently wear my Dujarier immobilizing sling to rest it... In 21 years, this is the first trouble we've had, but we've also installed alarms.
So that's why I haven't answered any emails recently and why my messages here have been short.
One last thought, though: I and my family all wondered how this might have played out in the States, where both my burglar and I would very probably have been armed...
2 potential deaths avoided right there.
Much love to you all.
Tom in Paris