A brief moment of excitement in the humdrum and unexceptional existence of Hercules Terrace. As we headed out for a run this afternoon we noticed that the pavement directly next to my gate had been cordoned off and there was a policeman and a policewoman standing guard over it. As this tape also cut off the entrance to next door, for one horrible second I thought something might have happened to my neighbours (who I have never spoken to or even directly met in the nearly two years I've been here - isn't London a wonderful place? Especially if you are an anti-social misanthropist!), but an enquiry to the fairly tight-lipped policewoman revealed that whatever had happened to warrant the cordoning off of the pavement had happened somewhere on the pavement. But that was all the information they were going to give out. I looked at the cordonned off bit of pavement. It looked the same as it always did. There was nothing there. Not even an abandonned Christmas tree which are places at fairly regular intervals down my street. Surely there not being a Christmas tree was not reason enough for the police to cordon the area off. Perhaps like the building up of milk bottles on a doorstep, the absence of a Christmas tree dumped in the street in the first week or two of January indicates that something bad has happened to the occupants of a property. But then I haven't dumped a Christmas tree on the street outside my house (I don't have one, believing I am not justified in murdering a tree simply to briefly hang some tinsel on it) and no-one has cordonned off my house.
I wondered what had happened. I also wondered, if something had occurred on the bit of pavement directly adjacent to my house this afternoon, why hadn't the police rung my doorbell to ask if I had seen or heard anything that might help them in their investigations?
At the end of the run they were still there, still keeping tight-lipped, still apparently guarding nothing. If they'd asked I could have told them that for a few days last week, about two feet outside of the area that they'd cordonned off (and directly in front of my house), someone had dumped a suitcase. Being used to having pianos dumped on my property and the council having been so rude when I tried to get them to help me then, I had not wanted to trouble them with something so easy to remove as a suitcase and just waited for the binmen to take it away. After a couple of days, someone had opened the suitcase, presumably to look for valuables within (I had assumed it was empty) and strewn its contents- some women's clothing - on the floor next to it. Again I was conscious that if I got involved then like the piano the clothes and case might become my responsibility so left it where it was. A day or so later the clothes were not there. Maybe someone had stolen them, or someone else had put them back in the suitcase, fed up with the mess. Eventually the binmen arrived and the suitcase was disposed of. Where is Bagpuss when you need him?
Were the police combing the area for the suitcase? Had they cordoned off ten feet of pavement to do a finger-tip search in the hope that the lost suitcase and clothing (and who knows what else the thieves had got away with) would be found? Why hadn't they asked me about it so I could tell them that they were looking in the wrong place anyway? The police idiots.
Whatever crime had happened must have been reasonably serious as a policeperson remained on guard over the empty stretch for several hours. Later as I lay me down to sleep, my bedroom was illuminated by a series of bright flashes, like a UFO was now landing in the area. I wondered if the police had been informed of the imminent arrival of aliens at these exact coordinates (perhaps looking for their lost suitcase - which had supposed to go with them to Jupiter for their holiday but had ended up on Earth -Typical! Although I have been on many flights and this has never happened to me so I should say, Untypical!) and that's why they'd kept the empty pavement cordonned off: to make sure no-one got crushed by the space-ships arrival.
But looking out of the window I saw no alien craft, just the policeman who was now guarding the pavement and a police-van in the street and another person with a tripod taking photographs of the empty pavement.
He kept taking photos of the important nothing for at least another ten minutes as my bedroom continued to be eerily illuminated. I fear I will never find out why the pavement near my house became so important for an afternoon and evening. Maybe it's more interesting not to know. I just hope the suitcase wasn't significant.
