Boss Radio

Or to put it another way, we've been robbed.

Someone got into our car and took stuff from it.

They didn't take much, that's for sure. They took my GPS, but they didn't take the power supply, they took a pair of scissors (?), they took a CD of a group called Gran Torino (Have you ever heard of 'em?), and they took my mother's invalid parking card. There may be more missing, but that's all I could think of at the time, and it was a bit dark so I'll have to check the car out properly tomorrow to see if anything else is missing.

What they didn't take was the car radio on the back seat. Presumably they thought it must be a crap old thing otherwise it would have been installed, which is one small victory because it's the one that's installed that's the crap old thing. It's a nice radio really but it too was a victim of a previous robbery during the previous owner's time with this car. Someone broke in and, using some kind of extraction tool, tried to remove the radio, but they must have been doing it in the dark, the tool didn't grab the radio properly and instead of pulling it out, it broke off the 'Volume up' button. I finally got tired of having to poke a matchstick into the resulting hole to increase the volume, particularly since this method is getting increasingly unreliable (And anyway, the time when you want to put the volume up is almost always while you're driving) and exchanged a bit of computer knowledge for a new second hand radio.

The GPS system was pretty much useless to me since the maps were a year out of date and I couldn't update them because Garmin insist upon you using Microsoft to access their site, so issed poff as I am I haven't actually lost that much, especially since I'd never actually got around to using the thing for an actual trip. Since getting it I've never gone anywhere that I didn't already know the way to.

The scissors were a cheapo pair that I carried in the car 'Just in case', and the only thing they'd been used for was to trim the grass around the flowers on dad's grave. We're not short of the odd pair of scissors around here so aside from a vague feeling of unease as to why the the miscreant took them, we're not too bothered about their loss. Oddly they were the first thing we noticed was missing, but we thought nothing of it. Who'd break into a car to steal a pair of scissors?

The invalid parking validation is replaceable for around £5.50, which is annoying but won't break the bank, so that leaves the CD, which is what's annoying me the most right now. I liked that CD and it's not exactly the easiest thing to get ahold of these days. It's hard to imagine some opportunist thief thinking 'Wow, I gotta have that!!' but that's got to be what happened. The alternative is that someone went to the trouble of breaking into our car because he actually wanted a copy of that record, which would have to be one of the greatest coincidences of all time. On the other hand, the CD was the only thing visible in the car. The scissors were in the glove compartment, the parking permit was under the blanket on the passanger seat, and the GPS was on the back seat with the radio under another travel blanket.

I reported the crime because I don't want anyone telling me that crime is going down just because I couldn't be bothered to report it, but I'm not expecting it to be a priority to whichever poor old detective gets stuck with the case. Then again, last week we received a letter from the police addressed to my late father. They had caught the man responisible for a crime commited against him in 1998. It's good to know that they keep plugging on with their open cases, but now I'm intrigued to know what the crime in question was. Mum sure doesn't remember.

I suppose I'll just press on with life. You can get a little fed up with always being the victim, but really this is just life wobbling along as usual. Two weeks ago I won £250 on a 'phone-in quiz show, so I guess once again the balance of life is restored; the street giveth, and the street taketh away. I've just got to get over this horrible feeling that the person who did this likes the same kind of music as me, and may therefore have attended one of my gigs at some time. That and buy a lottery ticket ready for life's next upturn...