The tale of the fox and the slipper

It was about 10pm one evening in early July. This was back when it was warm, but before it got obnoxiously hot. I was sitting in my living room, half-watching a show on Netflix (It had Anna Kendrick in it and it was OK, but I didn’t like it enough to remember what it was called) and thinking about going to bed, when I heard a sudden loud crashing noise. It sounded very much like someone was in the front porch.

This triggered a memory for me, which I’ll share with you now:

Back (cough twenty years ago cough) when I was a psychology student at Cardiff Uni (no idea why you need the details but I feel like it adds colour to the anecdote…), I lived in a house with a similar set up to the one I’m currently in. It had a front door which opened into a small porch/cloakroom and then a door beyond it opening straight into the living area.

One day I had been doing some work on my laptop in the front room when I heard the door open and someone enter the porch area. I assumed it was one of my housemates, although it became a bit weird when they didn’t enter the rest of the house. As it was only me downstairs, I kept quiet, trying to hear what was going on. After what seemed like forever the mystery intruder opened the porch door and stepped in to the main living space, by which time I was standing in the raised kitchen area holding a knife.

It was definitely not one of my housemates, but a rather large guy with a big backpack. I asked him what the fuck he was doing in my house at which – presumably not expecting to be questioned – he garbled something about looking for Lee Evans, so I screamed GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HOUSE and he kindly obliged and pegged it up the street in a way that an innocent person probably wouldn’t have done. I very much suspected that he was not in fact looking for Lee Evans or any other small sweaty comedian, but more likely for laptops etc to pinch.

Anyway, it got reported to the police, and then we started making sure the door was properly locked. End of story. Sorry it wasn’t more interesting.

And back to 2022.

I’m sitting on the sofa, and I can hear things being dropped and moved around. At first I think maybe it’s a bag which has been left precariously on the edge of the shoe rack but the noises continue for too long to be anything but someone in there, sorting through the bags and shoes.

Now, I know that our door is self locking, so I start panicking a little bit; surely anyone who goes to the effort of breaking into a locked door must mean business. This time I don’t have an open plan kitchen I can casually wander into in order to retrieve some kind of weaponry, and of course I have two kids upstairs asleep, or at least pretending to be.

Annoyingly, the security camera battery is on charge, so I can’t even check to see what’s going on, and so I sit there with my heart thumping until the noises stop. Whoever it was hasn’t come in; they seem to have gone away. Maybe they could hear the TV.

It takes me another few minutes to get the courage up to take a look and open up the porch door, and indeed there are shoes all over the place that have been pulled from the rack. It doesn’t take me long to realise that one of my slippers has gone, a Reiker sandal no longer has a partner, a glove has been pinched and one of my son’s sandals is gone too.

Bit weird, I thought.

It was then I remembered that earlier in the day, my eight year old daughter had gone to the car to look for something which she had, predictably, put down right in front of her. She’d obviously left the front door wide open; an invitation to whoever happened to be walking past. She’d then closed the porch behind her. Kids can be bloody hard work.

But why would anyone break into someone’s house to nick a slipper and two odd sandals?

That’s odd, even for some kind of foot pervert.

And then I heard the memorable shrieking of the local fox, and it all clicked into place.

What a twat. The sodding fox had come in through the open door and stolen my fucking shoes. Those slippers were my favourites.

The next morning, in the light of day, I found one of my son’s sandals on the driveway which confirmed my suspicious. No sign of my sandal (boo), my slipper (hiss) or my glove though.

But it doesn’t end there.

Two weeks later, I was walking down the road when I came across a house – it looks like hoarders live there, if it’s yours then tidy your fucking garden up – with a collection of shoes on the driveway. Among them: MY FUCKING SLIPPER.

To my surprise it didn’t smell of piss, so somewhat triumphantly, I swiped it from the pile. For reasons that aren’t entirely apparent to me still, I hadn’t thrown my slipper or my sandal out. Just in case the thief had a fit of conscience and decided to return it or something I guess. I don’t know.

Reunited at last!

Obviously the stolen slipper was a bit mucky, so I stuck both slippers in the washing machine.

Don’t do that; sheep’s wool does not like being washed.

Oops. No slippers for me. I’ve left them in the garden so he can have the both of them this time.