It’s story time again. There hasn’t been much opportunity for messing around in the garden or painting in the house, as I’m knocking out a bit of what’s popularly known as ‘content’ in the world of marketing and such. This involves a lot of sitting in my shed – sorry, ‘studio’ – staring at the screen and muttering. And it means nothing’s happening that’s particularly bloggable (not that that’s been an issue before).

So rather at a tangent, this makes me think of security. The ‘studio’ has a decent amount of computer gear in it, not to mention cameras and such, so it needs to be secure – and it is, before you get any ideas. But we did install a light outside with a motion sensor to deter any wandering housebreaker – or possum – who may happen by.

There’s scope for more stringent security measures – a burglar alarm, for example, or a pack of vicious hounds. But before that happens, I need to get over the trauma of what happened a few years ago – a lot of years ago, in fact, in the mid-90s when I lived in London.

It was like this: two of my friends – a couple – found themselves working as housekeepers for a millionaire in the desirable residential precinct of Highgate Village. (A lot of what I’d call Commonwealth kids found ourselves in these situations as we eked out a living while exploring the wide world outside the repressed countries we grew up in.)  His neighbour on one side was Sting, and on the other, Annie Lennox. It was that kind of neighbourhood.

This guy was not so much a captain of industry as an admiral. In the downstairs toilet hung a cheque for tens of millions of pounds, signed by him and encased in an acrylic block – a trophy from a bygone deal where he’d bought something huge. The place was beautiful – and stuffed with tasteful things which he was justifiably concerned should remain in his possession. So he’d installed a sophisticated burglar alarm.

The Admiral and his family travelled a lot, and as my friends occupied a separate cottage on the grounds, I was drafted in to house-sit the main home. It was a cushy job, really: I’d wake up in a four-poster bed, bathe in one of those Cleopatra baths which sat in the centre of a palatial bathroom, and depart for work craning my neck to see if Sting or Annie were putting the bins out.

We had a couple of very convivial dinner parties in the wonderful basement kitchen, always very careful and respectful, supplying our own food and wine and thoroughly cleaning up afterwards, but even so, entertaining in these surroundings was something of a treat and we enjoyed feeling a little more genteel in our borrowed privileged surrounds. 

That is, until the one evening when everything went horribly wrong. I was on my own in the house for once, wandering from room to room and wondering how it would feel if it was my own (as the proprietor of Corner Cottage, Braidwood NSW, I now know). On the mantlepiece in the bedroom I found a small plastic box with a button in the middle and a length of wire, maybe 20 cm long, hanging out of it. It was odd. It looked like an Apple mouse, but there was no USB plug on the end. What could it be? Almost automatically, I pressed the button.

To be really precise, this is where the situation really went downhill. Because it only took a few seconds – which seemed to last forever – to register that I had happened upon a panic button and triggered the loudest and most penetrating burglar alarm ever devised in the wide world of home security.

The racket was unearthly. It’s difficult to express in words how the monstrous pulsating howl seemed to bypass all rational portions of the mind and assault the very primal centre of the lizard brain. No thought was possible – the fright/flight/fight response was well and truly triggered and it was all I could do in the first milliseconds to retain control of my bladder.

Soon afterward, one thought struggled through the panic: find the bloody thing and switch it off. It would have been audible for miles around – I could imagine Sting pausing in his tantric activities and Annie cursing in rich Aberdonian tones. I fully expected the police to drop their doughnuts, hastily swig their tea, and rush to the scene with truncheons drawn.

But I couldn’t find the controls or indeed the speaker or horn or whatever instrument it was that continued to assail the eardrums with its incessant clangour. The urge to run away didn’t abate, so on a second-by-second basis about 95% of my energy was devoted to just not running away.

I was joined in short order by my friend, one half of the housekeeping couple, who knew where to go and what to do. His presence was calming, but try as we might, communicating in shouts and signs, we could not get the thing to shut up. Crammed into a cupboard under the stairs, we entered and re-entered the magic code to no effect. We phoned the security company who helpfully told us to enter the code (I think – because it was hard to hear them, due to, you know, the catastrophic burglar alarm going off).

Memory fails me when it comes to how we finally got it to stop. That part of proceedings is clearly erased by the trauma of the night’s events. I’ll just add that about 40 minutes after the blessed silence descended – although our ears still reverberated with remembered racket – the police turned up.

“We have a report of a disturbance at this residence, sir,” they said.
“Ah, no constable, nothing going on here – accidentally set off the alarm,” I said.
“All right, sir – not to worry. We’re all human after all,” they said (or something to that effect.)

Not to be critical, but they didn’t ask me who I was or request proof of ID. I could have had the whole family lashed to chairs in the cellar for all they knew.

So the moral of the story is . . . I guess, don’t press buttons if you don’t know what they do. Suffice to say, I was never invited to house sit there again. As for complex alarm systems, Corner Cottage may yet avail itself of some security tech, but I’m saying nothing — I don’t want to blow the gaff on our security arrangements on a public blog – that would be silly.