On Monday I arrived home to find a broken kitchen window, a missing laptop and a bedroom that had clearly been briefly ransacked.

Now I’ve always been relatively liberal on issues of crime and punishment. The right-wing ‘lock-em up’ approach is clearly the soft, less effective option.

However, it is also the emotionally satisfying one, so finding myself the victim of crime, my first reaction was the desire to meet whoever broke into my home and hurt them with a large mallet. The next day, speaking to neighbours, I found myself agreeing with the empty statement ‘they’re evil’, which isn’t actually a helpful attitude.

Funny how your emotions don’t listen to reason.

So that evening was ruined, which was particularly annoying as Joe had come round to work on guitar parts for September’s gigs. We didn’t make much progress with that. Instead the police arrived and I briefly lived in the world’s most boring episode of CSI. The highlight of this was the momentary suspicion that we had found blood. This turned out to be paint.

This was followed by a long day waiting for glaziers, buying and fitting various locks and so on.

Also, I now own a large mallet.