Wednesday
Dear Elsie
Today is the day Grandpa went and bought a new TV. It was not immediately available, so it will be delivered. Courage is happy to take the old one off our hands. It had me thinking about our TV history.
We’ve had two TVs stolen in our lives. The first was in 1998, when we had a nasty premeditated break-in at our previous home. Aunty Mary, who lived across the road, warned us that she had seen some people watching our house. The garden was not enclosed at that time and one day, she saw someone walking around the back of the house and went to investigate. Aunty Mary was feisty. Sure enough, there were a couple of chaps showing an interest in our back windows. They ran when Aunty Mary appeared. It was after this that we started locking the back bedroom doors as an additional security measure.
One Monday morning, we left for work as usual. The children had asked me if they could go to aftercare at school, just once, to see what it was like so that Monday was the chosen day. As a result, I stayed longer at work. Early afternoon, I got a frantic call from another neighbour, Dawn – “Helga! They’ve broken into your house!” I jumped into my car and raced home. How strange it was to have a police car with sirens blazing overtake me and for me to realise it was on its way to my house.
What had happened is the baddies had kept an eye on the house and when the coast was clear had gone round the back and got into one of the back bedrooms through a small skylight window. When they found the bedroom door locked, the chap outside handed the one inside a rock and he proceeded to break a hole in the bedroom door and access the house. The kids bedrooms were downstairs and contained nothing of value for them, so they headed upstairs and rifled through all our belongings, stealing what, in effect was of very little value at the time. There were no cell phones or laptops in 1998. There was a hi-fi, the cord of which they ripped out the wall and it must have made a big bang because there was a black mark on the wall. They stole clothes and a bedspread (that was of great sentimental value) to put stuff in. They loaded it all downstairs by the sliding door. Then they waved to their get-away vehicle which was on the top road behind our house and a kombi came around and parked in the driveway. Then they forced open the sliding door and started packing their loot into the car, including the TV.
About that time, Aunty Mary looked out her window and wondered who they were. She came outside and one of them came across to her and asked her for some water. When she saw one of his accomplices carrying our stuff out, she started screaming. The thieves leapt into the car and rushed away. Aunty Mary yelled at the passing postman to get their car registration number, which he did.
I arrived home shortly after the police arrived and indeed the house had been ransacked. A most unpleasant occurrence but, if Stacey and David hadn’t been to aftercare, we could quite easily have walked right into it happening. That was 1998. We upped security and a friend gave us an ancient Telefunken TV….something like this (photo from Pintrest)
She warned us it had some foibles and we soon discovered them. It didn’t turn on immediately. It needed to ‘warm up’, so if you wanted to watch TV, you had to be prepared to wait after you turned it on. After a while, we realised there was only one way to get it to start at all and that was to heat up the back with a hair-dryer. So, a hair-dryer moved into the lounge for convenience and the kids would get home from school and would heat the TV up with the hair-dryer so they could watch TV. It was an ongoing point of both amusement and irritation. There were also some arguments as to who was to heat up the TV. After all in 1998, Stacey was 10 and David 7. Eventually they were so happy when we finally announced a new TV would be bought and this old one would be dumped.
And so it was!
By the way, the police followed up on the number plate and the burglars were caught but our belongings were never retrieved.
The second TV we had stolen was on 1 September 2017 and was burglary number 3 in a spate of robberies we endured over a 5 week period. I wrote about that here.
The TV we bought to replace that one is our current TV which is giving us screen issues. Mike phoned a technician today who said it is not really worth repairing, so to Courage it shall go.
Well that’s a long story long and pretty much all I can say about our TV history, for what it’s worth. Every now and again we reflect on heating up the TV and it causes much amusement!
I always like getting to Psalm 118 as it reminds us of this.
Psalm 118:24
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.
It’s not about now – we are only passing through.
Keep the smile going.
God bless you.
In His Grip,
Gran xx 🙂
