Boss Radio

Ah yes, one of the great moments in TV history. Frank Forello, the beleaguered police captain in 'Hill Street Blues', is trying to get a grip of all the demands upon his time. Gang wars, liquor store hold ups, a mayoral visit, rogue cops... Suddenly his wife, Faye, bursts into the room. "Crime, Frank," she cries. "It's everywhere!"

It still makes me laugh. A moment of extra brilliance in one of the most brilliant cop shows ever created.

It's just that when it happens to me I don't find it funny.

Picture it. Mum's car won't start but we need to go to the shops, she's running out of puddings and she likes her pud. As it happens I've just run out of fresh vegetables as well, and convenient as they are, frozen veggies just don't make it. So I break out the Land Rover.

My Land Rover doesn't get much use these days. Between the petrol prices and global warming there isn't much call for a gas-guzzling-go-anywhere vehicle.

So we get to the Co-op and the only parking place is in a disabled spot. As it happens my mother has a disabled parking badge, so, incongruous as it seems, this gentle giant of a vehicle pulls into the spot, I pull an old beer crate out of the back for mum to use as a step ladder to get out of it, and we leave it with the badge in the side window and commence shopping.

When we get back I open the back door to put our hard-gotten-gains in, and I see small shards of glass on the back seat. Well there's only one place that they can have come from and I turn 'round to look at the rear window. It has two giant cracks in it. Further investigation reveals that it has received two tiny high impacts about the size of an airgun pellet. There's about two yards between the back of the vehicle and the store, so someone's fired at it from point blank range.

And the glass took it.

Annoyed as I am at this violation of my vehicle I nevertheless find myself kind of amused as I imagine these kids (The schools were just coming out so I'm making a bit of an assumption here...) wanging a shot off at point blank range and getting nothing more than a little pitting and a crack for their trouble, so they try again and still get nowhere.

They depart, a picture of chagrin.

In fact if I'm lucky the pellet might even have bounced back and hit them.

Sorry if I keep coming back to a subject that probably means nothing to anyone who doesn't live in Western Europe and isn't old enough to remember the 80s, but I keep coming across stuff about radio (Wake up at the back there!) that continues to annoy (Make that 'Infuriate') me.

This is a statement made my her majesty's Home Office back in the 60s when they were trying to shut down the offshore stations.

"I think we have to very seriously consider the enormous disadvantages of having a vast army of people who can communicate with each other very easily".

They must be pretty apoplectic about the internet then.

Meanwhile an underage kid who got stoned, stole a car, lost control of it, and ran over an elderly pedestrian, killing him, got banned from driving for two years, two months in juvie, and a year's probation. A guy accused of running a pirate radio station (Not convicted you'll notice) had all his equipment confiscated, including his DJ gear and record collection, and was issued with a warning by the court. A warning for what? Being found not guilty?

Nope. He was warned that if he was actually found guilty of making illegal radio broadcasts at anytime in the future he faced an unlimited fine and/or two years in prison.

It seems the punishment for drunk driving, car theft, and manslaughter is lower than that for making an unlicenced radio broadcast. Indeed, it's not much higher than that for not making an illegal radio broadcast.

What ARE they so scared of?

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...