Will I ever find peace from the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune? (It’s beginning to look like the answer to that question is NO!!!) Between school, Elvin, Flynn, Marcus, my family and trying to keep my sanity and sense of humour despite all of them, I found it v difficult to get to sleep last night. It was raining pretty hard, so even the wind chimes weren’t as soothing as usual. I never count sheep (I don’t know about anyone else, but I can never get the sheep to jump over the fence), but eventually I was so desperate that I started going through my multiplication tables. I reckoned that should do it, since it’s usually only with SUPERHUMAN effort that I manage to stay awake in maths. I was soaring through the fives when I heard someone outside. At first I thought it was a cat (though not Mr Kipling, of course, since I’ve been très careful about keeping him IN since all that trauma). Then it made another noise, and I knew that if it was a cat, it wasn’t your average sort of cat; it was more like a PUMA. I was at the window in a flash! There was just enough light from the other flats for me to make out a dark sinister figure crouched like a v large puma on the garden wall. All those lectures from the MC about what to do in an emergency finally paid off. I quickly squeezed through my door, raced into the kitchen and dialled 999. Then I went to wake up Justin. (He’s always had more of a sense of adventure than the parents, and he acts without thinking.) Justin wasn’t asleep; he was working on some project for college at his desk. He grabbed his camera and ran to the kitchen. I grabbed his heaviest tripod and followed. The rest, as they say, is history. Justin was just stepping out of the garden door with a tea tray over his head when I got to the kitchen. He shouted something threatening like “Don’t move!” and then he started snapping. I reckon it was the first flash that caused the intruder to fall off the wall. I ran into the garden brandishing the tripod and warning him that the police were on their way. Justin yelled at me to be careful of his tripod, and the dark sinister figure roared, “For ****’s sake, Janet, are you trying to kill me?” It was Mr Burl. My wind chimes were driving him BONKERS and he’d hauled himself up on the wall to try and cut them down. He stabbed himself in the calf with his pocket knife when he fell off the wall.