2004-01-30 - 4:15 p.m.

London

Back from the Cape. Heathrow arrivals was like one of those plunge pools outside Swedish saunas, but without the nude blondes.

And straight into domestic turmoil.

Our landlady used to bumble along in the �quite adept at causing minor inconveniences but nothing too sinister� lane. Yesterday, however, she swerved without anything in the way of indication into the �delusional harridan who will be the cackling bane of your life� lane.

Seems she�s been running up debts all over town, using our address as her residence on official fines, and when the big boy�s come a-knockin�, we�re the ones on the front line.

Looks like she�s been parking up her jalopy just about anywhere she likes for the last decade, and the nice people at Traffic Bastards want to come down and get financially medieval on her ass. The note had some kind of primordial scrawl on it by the bailiff / direct genetic descendant of a gorilla�s unfortunate coupling with a velociraptor that they�ve seen fit to employ. He informed us that he would be around presently to relieve us of our worldly goods.

My phone conversation with the hulking obsidian goon (his voice sounded about six foot four) went more or less as follows:

�Hello Mr Bailiff. You�ve got the wrong house. Ms Devil-May-Care Diplomatic Parking Fine Immunity lives somewhere else now.�

�(at a bass level that only five grand speakers could replicate) That�s not my problem. You�re in the house (I refrained from singing �Who�s in the house?�) that the debt is registered to. I�m coming in there tomorrow to take property.�

�But it�s not her property.�

�The house is.�

�But we�re just renting the house from her.�

�(in scary monotone) I�m coming round tomorrow��etc, etc�

You get the idea. It was like trying to reason with a congenitally retarded Robocop. I imagine at some point seconds earlier his eyes had turned yellow and he shouted out the word �AC-TI-VA-TED!� in a metallic voice.

We set about packing our prized possessions into bags that we could take to work and hiding our stereo systems under curtains. At least, that�s what I did. I figure that bailiffs are notoriously moronic, and would be fooled by a hi-fi draped in a floral sheet, thinking it to be, oh, I don�t know, a flowery sideboard or something.

Our flighty bint of a landlady refused to reply to her messages, despite us warning her that they were coming to strip the floorboards, meaning that all we could do was sit and wait for Robobailiff to come and try and penetrate our defences.

Our only window of opportunity came with a few frantic calls to the letting agent, asking them to make our tenancy status known, maybe by shipping out a small droid projecting a short movie clip of us signing the lease or something. Thankfully, they managed to get through to the Duh-minator and told him to cool his boots, so for now our possessions are safe.

Be nice if our landlady surfaced sometime before we�re hung up by the nethers for her debts, though.