Interesting occurrence at our house two nights ago:

M and I were both dead asleep at midnight when we heard (and felt) a major crash and heard glass shattering. We though it was the garbage truck (they come late at night on Thursdays and make a lot of noise), but then about 30 seconds later we heard it again and felt the building shaking.

M jumped out of bed to look out the window and then turned around and yelled "Someone is BREAKING INTO OUR BUILDING! DON'T MOVE!" and sprinted for the front door. (Of course, I think that means that we have people charging up the stairs, but he just wanted to make sure we were locked and bolted. Which we were). There's no way I was just going to sit in bed and let this happen, so I dashed after Michael and called the emergency services number (which serves police, fire, ambulance, and coast guard, apparently. Just in case Curtain Road ever floods). While I was trying to get through to the police Mike went back to the window to see a few guys (2? 3? 4?) run out of the office that's on the ground floor of our building and take off on mopeds with a bunch of laptops.

(Note: While it was super-trippy and somewhat cool to hear a clipped voice answer the phone with "Hello, New Scotland Yard," I was wholly unimpressed with my ability to get through to the police. What about "I live at [building number, street name, post code] and someone is breaking into our building right now!" is so hard to understand?!?" I finally gave the phone to Michael, and he couldn't get them to recognize our address, either. Not comforting.)

Anyway, while we were on the phone, a police car comes flying down our street (the people in the building across the street called immediately, as they saw the whole thing too). We hang up with Scotland Yard (who still haven't found our address yet) and M and I and our downstairs neighbors Ollie and Lorna all hang out the windows screaming down at the cops about what we saw. We had all been asleep and all had seen (and heard) different things, but the stories all matched.

Ollie and Lorna are lovely – we don't know them that well at all, but they're our age, creative types, and do a lot of what we do (cook at home, play funk music, have friends over). Ollie's always struck me as kind of a tough bloke himself, and my favorite quote of the night came from him, leaning halfway out their living room window, shirtless, bed-headed, still with the phone because he was calling 999 too, yelling in his thick accent "OY! Then the fat one grabbed a laptop and took off on the moped!" (See...there was humour!)

The next morning as I was leaving for work the people who own the office that was robbed were outside and I got to talk to them. Apparently the robbers seriously warped the security gate somehow - maybe with a crowbar, but maybe by ramming a car into it (which is called a "ramraid," I guess, and somewhat common in Britain) or hooking it to a car's bumper and pulling - and then smashed the shit out of the security glass behind it. They made off with 2 G5 desktops and 3 laptops (they must have taken the computers the first time and the laptops on the mopeds). Very fucking scary.

What we can't parse out is whether the robbers were super duper stupid or really smart. Our street is well lit, well trafficked, and has a ton of security cameras. It gets constant foot traffic at all times (more humour: drunk pub/club-hoppers wandering down the street gawking at the cop cars and crime scene unit and four barely-clothed people hanging out the windows shouting) The office was right under the street lamp and they made a massive amount of noise. However, they must have had a plan, since you can't just throw a G5 on a moped and no one wandered by when they were carrying out the job, so they had to have been working with someone else or had lookouts or something. Yuck. M thinks maybe it was a gang initiation or something where brazen violence was encouraged. The thought of someone casing our apartment makes me ill, so I'm choosing to think it really was random. We haven't heard anything about the case, but we'll find out what's happening eventually.

I guess that living in the city is...well...living in the city.