Yesterday for the first time I activated the alarm system we inherited with our new home. It was less than five hours before it sent its first false-alarm to the monitoring service and ejaculated a screaming orgasm of a siren that I am told many of our neighbours thought heralded either a tsunami alert or the imminent arrival of a tardy Japanese invasion force.
It also drew forth the local constabulary who took the time and trouble to ring me at work to say my alarm was going. As I am unaware that I am “known to police” as police parlance puts it, this was an agreeable surprise.
But I was left to question why I am known. I would not have thought that even in a community as small as the one I now live in I was of such standing in that community. Both my speeding tickets have been paid, so it cannot be that. The sign out front proclaims and promotes the builder of the house, rather than a tinnie house. The light to the side of the house is blue rather than red testifying to the virtue rather than the vice of my lovely wife. Yes, I know I have not yet made my promised Westpac Rescue Helicopter donation, but it is a little early to call the police in on that. Yet I am known to police. Am I perhaps erroneously on one of those secret lists of “people of interest” they circulate through their stations? You know the ones: known car thief, hangs out (literally) at public toilets, steals bras, criticises Council. I am none of these of course. But now I am paranoid—what do the police have on me?
Or am I just being alarmist?
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Now playing: Led Zeppelin - Ocean
via FoxyTunes
The Long Walk Back
Someone, it may have been Will Rogers, once said of California that it was as if the United States had tilted, and all the country’s nuts ...
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