Articles

IS YOUR CAR SAFE?

My car was stolen two weeks ago from in front of my house in Headington. It was loaded with all the documents I needed to make sense of my life at the moment…financial files, cheque books, tax returns, BBC contracts and contacts, passport, driving licence, mobile…the list goes on and on. All of a sudden, in a matter of moments, someone entered my life and slaughtered bits of it. 

The police found the car a week later. It had not been torched, but most of the important items were missing. I’ll never be able to replace some of them, the others will take weeks, maybe months to reconstruct. 

It was a mistake to have all that information in the car, but that doesn’t make the trauma of losing it any easier. And it is a loss, a big hit. The adjustment takes time; it also takes up a lot of your life. You go through disbelief, to shock and anger as the little bits of shrapnel hit you when you remember more and more of what is gone. It’s like a fragmentation bomb that keeps going off in your mind for days.

Little things stand out in the haze of this happening. I rang Thames Valley Police in Kidlington to report it at 10.20 pm, and the first question the night worker asked me was whether or not the car was taxed. When I said ‘yes’, she asked what ethnic background I had, for instance was I black or Indian or Jewish. I said I didn’t see the relevance of this point to a report of a stolen vehicle.

Then she asked for my address for any correspondence. I gave her that but said it was currently a building site and could the police send any mail to my work address at BBC Oxford, 269 Banbury Road. She cut in there and said ‘I have Thames Valley FM coming up at that address. I explained that Thames Valley FM had died a death about ten years ago and that we were now called BBC Oxford. But it rang alarm bells. If the Thames Valley Police computer was ten years out of date on addresses, what else could be askew?

The whole experience has alerted me to the roles of a lot of people in Oxford, and I’ve seen a lot of parts of Oxfordshire that I don’t usually see in my journey to recover my car. But one place stuck out…the garage in the north of the county that the insurance company uses to assess the car once the police release it from the garage they use in the south.

The north garage gave me the best tip-off of the whole experience. ‘Your’s was an M reg Corsa. They are easy pickings. The cars we see now are almost exclusively fifteen year old Corsas, Astras and VW Golfs, because they are the targets at the moment.’ So if you have one, be on your guard!

Has anything like this ever happened to you?