Thursday – The Saga of the Keys Goes On

I'm more than likely wanted by the police here now. Not that they will know my name, or where I live, but there will be a report of a vagrant trying to get into a beach house in Golden Bay in the early hours. How I ended up looking like I was breaking into a house is not such a long story, but I'm sure that I'll be able to pad it out a little, to make it even less interesting than normal.

It was very early when I set out to start work down south, and because of the time, the traffic was moving on the motorway through the city centre really quickly. I'd left enough time to put up with 30 to 40 minutes of traffic jams, but as these didn't materialize, I found myself in the Mandurah about 1 hour before I was supposed to start work.

Instead of twiddling my thumbs, and reading the paper – as all good ambulance people should do when there is nothing to do – I though, I'll go over to Golden Bay to the beach house and drop off my stuff that I'll be using for the night.

After some juggling with the UBD
(remember – what a map is called here for some reason), I found the road just back from the beach and in the dawn light, tried to find the property. As I didn't have the original keys to the house anymore, and just the spare set, the number wasn't written on them. I cast my mind back into the fog of a few days ago, and remembered the number 12.

Let me describe the beach house. It was an old railway station from somewhere out in the country, that had been picked up, and moved in its entirety to Golden Bar. Surely there wasn't that many old station houses in this road, so I didn't pay close attention to the house numbers, and found a house that I thought was the one. As I drove into the driveway (old wooden single story building with a couple long verandas on both sides) I saw on the letterbox that this was number 12.

Great – I'll just pop my head inside, open the shutters, and air the place out ready for me tonight. I fished out the keys and as I walked up to the front door, noted also that a New Zealand flag – Carol and Rob who own the place are from New Zealand – was in the window. (I don't know if you are up on the flags of the world, but the Australian and New Zealand flags are almost identical – and as it turns out, I don't know the difference).

I wrestled with the keys for about 10 minutes, looked around the back of the house, before giving up and resigning myself to driving back up to the city after work. I called Carol a little later, when it was a sensible hour, and as it turns out – it was 24 not 12. Hopefully I'll be able to get into that property a little more successfully.

I wouldn't make a particularly successful cat burglary, I've decided, as I can't even get into the right house, let alone get into it, even with the keys.