It was when I saw the gate flying open at the back of the house that I realised something wasn't right.
In fact, I heard it before I saw it, crashing against the outside wall - the flapping of a particularly immodest tongue.
I looked around for my keys (it took forever, as I'm particularly disorganised. If there were ever a fire, I'd be burned to ash) and after that long hiatus, swung the back door open.
The footprint halfway up, just below the glass, made it obvious that somebody had been trying to get in. They'd tried, failed, and gone away again, leaving me with a broken door and the sense of not being as secure as when I woke up.
Not as secure, that's true, but I haven't yet been struck by the panic and fear which I'd always imagined such an attempt would bring. Your author is the type of man who'd hand over his phone, keys, card, cash, anything, to a would-be assailant in the hope of escaping without any physical injuries - but for some reason I don't feel particularly threatened.
Material things don't matter too much, anyway - I say this with some uncertainty, it being that I own all the trappings of a 21st-century existence. I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to live without any of them; no phone, no internet, stripping away all the frippery until I'm living like Jozef Stawinoga, who spent fifty years on the grass verge next to the ring road in Wolverhampton.
Material things might not matter, but what price security? We go back to the old political equation where every unit of freedom taken away - another affront to civil liberties - is understood to be another unit of security given. If I had fifty iron gates, a thousand attack dogs, a moat, gun-toting security men ringing the property and the most sophisticated CCTV system known to humanity, is the price of such security worth paying in terms of the effect on my own mind?
When one adopts such extreme measures, it frames everyone else as a potential threat, a potential kicker-in of doors, a potential assailant. How long would it be before I was hiring another team of security guards to vet and monitor the first lot; until I had brought in CCTV cameras to train on the operators of my CCTV cameras?
The risk of violation is always there, but the shadow it casts tells us that we are human. To perfect every calculation is to exist in a world of robots.
