4.30 wake up call

  • By Alison
  • 9 December, 2007
  • Comments Off on 4.30 wake up call

Hearing the doorbell ring at 4.30 in the morning is a disconcerting thing. To start with, your subconscious has to wake up your conscious brain and get you
moving. Then you spend a few seconds wondering what woke you, and then you barrel on down the stairs wondering how long it actually was since the button was
pushed.

And then of course – it’s a policeman standing at the door. It’s quite unreal. He’s in his shirtsleeves, and must be freezing. My first thoughts
are not even coherant. It’s all we can manage to do to say “yes?”. When he asked if we (at least one of us!) is Paul H, and we affirm it, this is
when my brain clicks into on gear, and formulates the worst possible question – and perhaps the only reason he’s standing there.

But it doesn’t come. There isn’t a hushed voice and urgent news of a car accident. Instead it’s another question. “Do you own a cream
scooter?”. The answer to that is a quick look round him and into the front garden. Where the scooter stands no longer.

It’s now up the end of the street, lights on, front ripped off, and lock barrel smashed in. A group of 5 lads has carried it out of our front garden and
into the car parking area behind the last house. They were obviously trying to get it running, and were disturbed. The neighbours looking over the carpark have
seen them and called the police, so there we all stand at 4.30am, shivering and chatting about it.

Paul pushes it back to our front yard and removes the batteries. The lights go off, and it’s probably the last time, since he’s feeling so violated by
that, that he’ll probably just replace it rather than having it fixed. He won’t have much choice about that though, since it’s insured in my name,
and I’ll be the one sorting out which is the best option.

This is the 3rd incident we’ve had with a scooter. The first being my old scooter – a yellow ninger (NRG, but named the ninger since that’s how it
sounded!). It was found several streets away with the lock barrel ruined, but sitting on its stand, no other damage. Several months later after getting it
fixed, it was stolen again and not recovered.

My ducati was never stolen, but it was knocked over twice and damaged by our neigbhours yardie boyfriends and their revved up cars. I always wondered if that
was deliberate.

Replacing the NRG, Paul bought a Tornado. The big brother to the NRG. It was now he who rode the scooter far more than I, since we had the girls now, and I
worked from home. And too late he discovered that it as apparently the scooter of choice for the young gangs. It went, never to be seen again with its outer
bits on. It was found burnt out, but a prosecution was made. Which made us feel better about it.

The next scooter he bought was a really old man style scooter. Deliberately getting something that had no joy-ride potential. He bought it broken and had it
fixed easily, but it was huge, and horrible. Eventually he sold it. But it sold for £300 more than he bought it for, so that wasn’t a bad thing! He
replaced it with a good scooter, but one that was old and rusty. This became a trusty steed for quite a while. It had a great engine, it just looked shoddy.
And then stupid driver who didn’t think about looking in the rearvision mirrors wiped him out by changing lanes at the last minute, and the insurance
company wrote it off.

The replacement for that – and the one that was stolen last night – was the same kind. A good sturdy scooter, but one that looks shoddy. On our street there
are 2 scooters and 2 motorbikes that all park together on the street. And then there is ours, which is in the front yard. But that was a thinly veiled
illusion of safety, as they managed to carry it out of the yard without anyone hearing. We have the back bedroom, so we’d never have heard much anyway. If
only they’d done it while we were sleeping in the loft bed while my inlaws were over. With the window next to our heads, we’d have woken immediately.

Anyway, later today the forensics are coming over to get fingerprints. But it’s raining. They need it to dry before they can do that, and we have no way of
covering it without touching it with the plastic cover. But we’ll see what happens.

I just hope that they catch these lads.

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