It happened at 4:30 on Saturday morning (yesterday). I was woken up by some very loud banging outside. My first thought was that it was either someone breaking into cars or drunken students, both fairly common occurrences here (the car thieves seem to smash a side window then have a look around and see if there's anything worth taking; often there isn't, so they just leave a small pile of glass and a pissed-off owner). Or it could even have been our weird neighbour messing about with recycling boxes, as she for some reason likes to do. So I looked out the window but there was no one and nothing there. The banging went on, getting louder, and then there were a series of crashes against the wall that shook the whole house. Oh shit! I thought, We've got burglars trying to smash the door in! But thankfully there was no one trying to get in through the door, windows or anywhere else. Then Mrs Cudzo realised where the noise was coming from.
"There's someone trying to steal the bikes," she said. We have a small row of Sheffield stands, embedded in concrete and with a generous roof but with unenclosed, round the side of the house, which are used by us and a few neighbours. Well, I wasn't going to stand by and let that happen, so I put on my slippers (crocs, in fact!) and went out. "Be careful!" said my wife, but I didn't really care. And there was a bloke I'd never seen before, wrestling with a bike. Mrs Cudzo says she heard him saying "Come to me, bike!" but I didn't hear that. So I confronted him. He claimed it was his bike and he'd been visiting his friend Tom. I'm not sure that we have a neighbour called Tom, but it's possible. He'd got a key for the lock, he said, and showed a key. It was true the bike was in fact unlocked, but for some reason he couldn't remove it. He even asked me to help him with it, but of course I didn't. "I'm going to call the police," said Mrs Cudzo. Do that, I said. "Shall I call them?" she asked. I thought you were already doing it! What's the number? Just dial 999. And she did.
Bloke seemed unperturbed. He was incredibly drunk and still trying to wrest the bike out. It had got one pedal caught in the spokes of another bike – one that's always there – but I didn't point that out to him, figuring the longer it took him, the better. In fact, I wasn't sure I'd seen the bike he was trying to take before. And now I did see something on the ground that looked like a bike lock and it did seem to be intact. Perhaps it really was his bike? By now Mrs Cudzo was talking to the emergency operator, or perhaps a police operative, I'm not sure which. At some point she asked me to talk, and I found myself answering a series of repetitive questions (Can you give a brief description of him? He's about 5'9", looks about 30, short, dark hair, wearing a black jacket. White male or black male? White. etc) given in a "we don't really care" voice, at the end of which the operator said the police would be with us shortly.
Meanwhile, bloke was complaining about his lost shoe. "Have you seen my shoe?" He was indeed hopping around, or lurching drunkenly, in one shoe and one sock. I had no idea where his other shoe was. While I was on the phone he shambled, with bike, up the garden. (Has he gone towards ... street or ... street? I don't know, he's gone towards the garden gate.) Only two minutes later, the police did arrive. Two of them, bloke with a big hipster beard and short, squat, bemuscled woman. They asked a few questions then went off to look for him. Did they find him? Probably not, as I presume we'd have heard from them: Can you identify this as the man who... ? Was he actually stealing a bike? I'm inclined now to think it probably was his own bike – I don't recall having seen it there before – and he was simply so drunk he couldn't even push it upright, let alone ride it. On the other hand, he was certainly causing a drunken nuisance at half past four in the morning, has bent the spokes in another bike's wheel, as well as causing me to abandon an ECE that day, so I say he stole my £3 entry fee and 2 AUK points. When I'm king of the world, that'll be punishable by a terrible torture, probably to be carried out by either Zipperhead or Wowbagger. Good job I'll never be king of the world, then.
I've seen his shoe this morning, it's a dark blue espadrille, lying there on the ground next between the Sheffield stands. He hasn't been back for it.
