house invasion - and the curse that follows.

I can only sympathise with Lily Allen. We too had somebody invade our house on Friday night. Bit of a kerfuffle and the front door banging open and shut. I thought it was Alan,  (not Lily Allen) Mary’s son, playing funny buggers. He does that sometimes and thinks he’s funny. He’s got a beard now, so it’s perhaps not the best time to tell him it isnae. And he’s off work, probably suffering from low self-esteem, which makes a wee change from suffering from epileptic fits and his ongoing anger issues. But listen, we’ve all got problems.

                The guy that had broken into our house was clearly terrified. He’d locked the door and said there was a guy outside with a knife going to stab him. Obviously the right thing to do was to (a) phone the police.

                (b) grab him by the scruff of the neck, fling him out and tell the guy with the knife, and his mates, if he was going to stab anybody to go and do it outside his own front door – and going fuck off. Which they did.  Because they were very reasonable and personable young men. That had obviously taken the wrong route with Buckfast wine and keeping bad company. They did insist on shaking my hand. I don’t mind that, as long as they did fuck off.

                But the story doesn’t end there. Because the last person to invade our house was Ian Betty’s wife. You’ll probably remember her as a wraith like figure with a drink in her hand. She’d taken the wrong turning, the wrong street, walked over a bridge and ended up completely blootered and lost and wandered upstairs into our bedroom where we were sleeping. That’s a lot of wrong turns. Even for the wife of Ian Betty.

                ‘I thought I was in my house,’ she said in explanation.

                ‘No,’ I said, very reasonably, because she didn’t have a knife. ‘I’ll think you’ll find this is our house. And you live in Trafalgar Street.’

                She was quite happy about that. And  I deposited her outside like a bin bag in  the lane. And even in the rain. But she’d made a terrible mistake, because like the seal on Tutankhamun’s tomb those that break the seal on Mary’s front door end up cursed as Lord Cardavon and his fellow travellers in Egyptology. Ian Betty’s wife died first, ate by her dog. Then shortly afterwards Ian Betty swallowed one glass eye too many and was found face down in his own vomit, a bag of Wotsits beside him. He’d overdosed on cheesy crisps. So those young men that have taken a wrong turn in life may find the Glendevon curse takes no prisoners and they better check the hieroglyphics for a suitable cure.