TOM UTLEY: Someone broke in as we slept upstairs. Don't let anyone tell you that burglary is just a minor offence

Sometime in the early hours of Wednesday morning, while we were asleep upstairs, an intruder entered our house and grabbed what he could lay his hands on.. Clearly, it was a quick in-and-out job, which couldn’t have lasted much more than five minutes. Only 3.9 per cent of burglaries result in a charge, while in 48 per cent of neighbourhoods nationwide, police have failed to solve a single case in the last three years It was our resident son who discovered that we’d been burgled, when he got up shortly after 6.30am to set off for his latest posting at an East London school, where he’s training to be a teacher. But he’d taken Mrs U’s favourite handbag — hugely annoying, since it contained our only other set of keys to our car, her bank card, wallet, Freedom Pass and much-loved photographs of her late mother and our four boys when they were young. So it was that for the next eight hours, almost without a break, we were ringing call centres and logging on to websites to cancel my wife’s bank card, report the burglary to the police, contact insurers, order a new passport, Freedom Pass and two replacement driving licences, seek help with our now undriveable car and summon an expert to change the locks on the front door. Enough to say that I spent all day listening to robotic announcements thanking me for my patience, warning me that my call could be recorded for training purposes, assuring me that ‘your call is important to us’, offering me a whole range of irrelevant options, logging on to the internet and, after being told ‘I’m just popping you on hold for a minute’, listening to endless irritating music.