The Diary: Alice Fishburn

As burglars go, I like to think that ours had a sense of humour. Not, admittedly, that this revealed itself immediately when they stormed through our house on a recent Sunday morning, only fleeing when they heard noises and realised that three of us were still in it. But it was only later that we caught the joke. After hours spent with the police, the forensics team and the insurers, and having checked multiple times that the door was, in fact, locked, we decided to take our minds off things by watching a movie. It was only once I sat down that I realised that though they had left the TV, they had taken the remote.

Everyone tells you how violated they feel by crime. And it's true. Not even the knowledge that we were joining a mass of other unfortunates - "I did five of these yesterday", said the forensics man - really helped. We were angry at our own stupidity (double lock, FT readers, double lock) and frustrated by the amount of admin the whole thing entailed. But no one warned me that I might also find myself irrationally offended by the discerning nature of our thieves.

Was there, I asked as I surveyed the wreckage, something wrong with my trusty, if battered, laptop? There must be. Why else would the thieves have left it where it sat, invitingly positioned on the kitchen table? The antique iPad that takes approximately 86 hours to charge was simply placed to one side in a gesture that might as well have been a sneer. Even my collection of leftover foreign currency was ignored. Were our things simply not good enough? Should we upgrade ourselves to the kind of people that burglars might actually want to steal from?

. . .

Still, if our electronics had disappointed, it soon became apparent that our nationalities had not. All the passports, adult and child, British and French, were gone. It was at this stage that the head-swimming, brain-melting, rage-fuelled state that invariably accompanies any in-depth negotiation with this country's bureaucratic systems began to kick in. The passport replacement forms initially lulled me into a false sense of security. Where were you born? London. Fine. What is your nationality? British. Fine. What is your parents' nationality? British. Looking good. Where were they born? Overseas. Computer says no. Do not pass go. Do not collect a new passport.

Eventually I managed to prove that I do, in fact, belong here - a process that involved a certain amount of familial bickering over ancestral birth dates, solved only by ordering old certificates in immaculate copperplate handwriting from the General Register Office. But then I still had to collect a counter-signature from someone who could testify that I was really me. Where were all the citizens of good standing? The first person that I saw who ticked the boxes turned out to be American. Not acceptable. The second: Finnish. I was beginning to feel not only in dire need of more respectable friends but also that I was possibly the only Brit I actually knew in London.

Meanwhile, over at the French embassy in South Kensington, my husband reported that the most difficult question posed to him concerned eye colour. Once that tricky issue had been resolved - gris-vert, in case you're wondering - the passport landed. If Theresa May, the home secretary, succeeds in introducing her British values test for those applying for visas, I hope "perseverance in the face of paperwork" is somewhere on the list.

The thought of our old passports doing the rounds somewhere out there is perhaps the most disturbing after-effect of the burglary: the very definition of an identity crisis. Still, I feel a little sorry for the black-market agent who ends up with the document featuring the photo of a furious three-month-old. Probably best to sell that one sight unseen.

. . .

Shortly before our lives were turned over to crime, police and bureaucracy, I had headed off to the National to watch the new Tom Stoppard play. The Hard Problem has been accused of being too, well, hard, for audience members. And there's little doubt that his exploration of neuroscience, consciousness and God provided both a mental pummelling and the normal Stoppard treat of making you feel more intelligent than you actually are.

As a student, I was once lucky enough to get a ticket to the staging of Stoppard's entire The Coast of Utopia trilogy at New York's Lincoln Center (broken only by samovar-themed meals at the local restaurant: a touch that cemented my faith in the ingenuity of American capitalism). When other audience members had arrived with cushions, I was baffled. But after nine hours of Russian philosophy, my body as pummelled as my brain, I understood. Remembering that, The Hard Problem, clocking in at a fast-moving 100 minutes, didn't seem so hard after all.

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It also marked the second time I've been to a Stoppard play with a Stoppard sighting. There he actually was, front and centre and mobbed as soon as the lights went up. This rather begs the question: does he go to every performance of his plays? That's a lot of nights out on the town. I hope he has a burglar alarm.

Alice Fishburn is deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine

Illustration by Nick Oliver

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