Diary - 2 September 2005

It is always nice to get back and find you haven’t been burgled. The locks were secure, the windows intact, and with a song in my heart I opened my bank statement. It all seemed pretty satisfactory, if a tiny bit emaciated, and for a second or two I let my eye run down the list of outgoings. Funny, I thought. What was this ‘payment to Egg’? I seemed to have been making all sorts of payments to something called Egg. In fact, Egg had received several grand from me. I looked closer, the beginnings of suspicion frosting my heart. Lastminute.com — £754. Che? Two big payments of more than £500 to a credit-card firm called Capital One. Hmmmmm. Another payment to Egg, of £1,000! Aaaargh. With the cry of one who finds a great tapeworm coiled in his innards, I twigged. I was being diddled. Someone had stolen my debit-card details. All the time we were in Uzbekistan, he or she had been living it up at my expense. I rang Barclays Premier emergency helpline, scrubbed the card, and asked what they could do to catch the thief. ‘Not a lot, I am afraid, sir,’ said the fellow. I just can’t believe it. These computer johnnies are so expert at following electronic trails that they can tell in a trice what websites you may or may not have visited five years ago — and now the bank says it can’t even tell whither they electronically dispatched all my hard-earned dosh. Well, I say to hell with it. I am going to pursue this. I am going to catch the little swine and, as Samuel L. Jackson says in Pulp Fiction, I am going to smite them with a terrible vengeance. Still, as banking disasters go, it’s better than the time Barclays contrived to pay my entire salary to someone else called Johnson.