26. Somebody has broken into the house next door to us.

Somebody has broken into the house next door to us.
It is used as offices by the local Youth Trust, a charity, so the break-in could have taken place anywhen from Friday afternoon onwards.
It is now Sunday and nothing would have been noticed until tomorrow had not the office cleaner gone in this afternoon.
There were no dead bodies so ol' Bill Petersen and his cronies were not called.
A solitary constable looked in, asked us if we had heard anything (we hadn't), made a lengthy entry in his notebook and departed saying of the perpetrator(s):
'They do it to feed their habit.'
From this I gathered that they sell whatever they steal to get money for drugs.
What an insane world.
I sometimes wonder whether anything has changed for the better.
I was a boy in the nineteen thirties. My mother did not have a washing machine, my father did not own a car, we did not have a refrigerator, there was no television; I could go on but it's too boring.
It was a time far removed from the present and a time which I would not wish to see again.
There was a lot of poverty and scant concern for those who suffered it. There was a rigid and unhealthy class system. There was, still is for that matter, one rule for the rich and another for the poor.
But there was no drug habit that I ever heard of.
People frowned on anybody who resorted to sal volatile or the aspirin bottle too readily.
The poppy was only mentioned on Armistice Day.
It is a pity that the search for freedom of spirit sometimes seems to have gone too far.
I know it's very easy for us oldies to bemoan progress. I just wish, though, that when these daft nippers are occasionally discovered 'feeding their habit' someone could deliver them a swift kick up the arse without risking a life sentence from the European Court Of Human Rights.
Is that not P.C?
Den Barnden