I’m not very well up on holidays abroad any more, and so I don’t know if the heinous crime which took place where my daughter, her family and friends were staying, is unusual, or now part of the holiday scene. What I did feel was that I should draw attention to what has happened, as between them the family’s jewellery, money, sleep and all the ambiance that one pays for with a foreign holiday was lost.
My daughter’s family and friends have been using a particular villa in Portugal for holidays over a number of years. It is nicely situated with respect to the sea, surrounding landscape, and access to towns for shopping and meals-out, in other words it was ideal. It has its own swimming pool, which means that the little tiny children, some who can barely walk, can swim away safely under the watchful eye of their parents. One day, on this last holiday, my daughter, her husband and their friends went out for an evening meal. When they returned they found the house had been broken into, and all the lockable, inbuilt safes in which were all their valuables and money, had been bodily removed with the contents. The shock, the disappointment, and the worry that it could happen again, perhaps with them in the house, ruined the holiday.
My daughter hasn’t gone into the logistics of what had happened, presumably because she doesn’t know. My interpretation is that this while the villa must lie idle between occupations for periods of time, this would give the thieves the opportunity to break in at their leisure, dismantle and re-erect the safes so the owners of the villa it would notice nothing out of the ordinary. It would then be a simple matter to watch the house and in particular if there were no small children, to assume that the holidaymakers would venture out for an evening in a restaurant, which would then give ample time to break in, break out the safes, and depart with the loot.
It seems that generally, we have lost yet another one of our freedoms, to enjoy safekeeping and