No life change ever runs smoothly. And true to fact, mine hasn't either. Over the next twelve months I have pledged to say goodbye to my magpie self, stop spending and start living. But recently the plan received a serious blow.
My house is a really great place to be. It was designed and built by an architect, making it completely different to the other buildings on our street. It has a sunny, open plan living space, a balcony off the kitchen area and bedrooms with access into a secluded private garden. We quite literally fell in love with the house as soon as we stepped inside it.
Unfortunately, everything that we love about the house also makes it really attractive to thieves. They like the distinctive look of the house, it suggest modern gadgets and easy to steal electricals aplenty, and they like the secluded garden as it means no-one can see them as they try to chisel doors open. In the six years we have lived here we have had two actual house break-ins, two car break ins (it's vandalised frequently), as well as several attempted house break-ins. All of our outside doors as pock-marked by the different tools which have been used to try and break the locks and prise them open.
The last actual break-in was truly frightening. My husband was away for a couple of days and I was staying at home with our son. In the middle of the night three men broke into the house through the front door. I was in a deep sleep and I woke up dazed and confused as to what all the noise was. I staggered out of bed, thinking that my son was talking loudly on the phone and with a notion that I was going to tell him to keep it down, but when I opened my bedroom door, I confronted a really tall man on the other side. Instinct immediately took over and I just screamed and screamed, and he and two others turned and ran back out the way they came in. I was so shaken that I could hardly phone the Police, as I struggled with the keypad on my phone while my brain straightened itself out and took in what had just happened.
The Police tell me that the thieves who carry out house break-ins are all cowards, but that doesn't really help your nerves as you wonder what ever bang and thump is in the middle of the night. Worse still our house has also been broken into during the day and I have had lads in hoodies in the garden in the afternoon (there is no public access to our back garden, you have to very purposely open our side gate to enter), which makes me nervous of bumps and noises during the day as well!
The final straw came a few days ago when I heard noises in the back garden and went to investigate and confronted two hooded men trying to chisel my french windows open. I screamed with a top-of-my-voice holler and they jumped over the (very tall) fence and ran off, but I was left really shaken by the whole thing. You can't help wonder, what if. What if I hadn't noticed the noise so quickly and they had got into the house?, what if I had cornered them by accident?, what if they were high on drugs?, would they hurt me? And it seemed like only a matter of time before someone got in again, this time when I was at home completely alone during the day.
To stay safe, I knew we had to upgrade our alarm system and get one which could be set at night and also one with cameras to monitor the outside of our house day and night, so that when someone comes to try to break in I can call the Police straight away, rather than having to go and check out strange noises and confront them myself. I got in touch with my dad (an electrical engineer) to ask advice about which DIY system to get and whether he would install it for me. I was anticipating a cost of £400 for an off-the-shelf package. But my dad didn't feel that he was the best person to install cameras and when he heard about another attempted break-in he insisted that he pay for a professional system to make sure I was protected. So, that is exactly what happened, at the cost of over £3,000, I now do feel completely safe in my own home, which I haven't done for years.
But I feel guilty that my dad had to pay for it and JW feels even worse than me. It is frustrating that at 33 years old you still have depend on your parents' for financial help. I would much rather stand on my own two feet and have a relationship with my parents' which is based on mutual respect, rather than being bailed out ever so often by them. It feels childlike and incompetent to still need such support. As much as I appreciate my parents' help, (and I really do, without them I would still be jumping at every noise and waiting for the inevitable to happen), I would much rather have been able to pay for the alarm myself. Which, I suppose, makes Operation Goodbye Magpie even more important, as we get back on our financial feet again. We also fully intend to fully pay back my parents. So although this is a major setback, it certainly isn't the end of Goodbye Magpie!
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