Um, can I buy some Mace?

Okay, so I was thinking yesterday, “I’ll just do some shopping, that’s safe enough (except not so safe for Mr. D’s credit card, but that’s another story.)

But then, well! There’s been a run of jewelry heists in local malls. Rosebank, Hyde Park, Sandton City. All of the hip shopping centres in Sandton, Jo’burg’s tony northern suburb. Gangs of armed robbers come in, with ammo and guns at the ready, and clean out the jewelry stores in these very upscale malls. Like having a massive gang of 12 guys with big, BIG weapons come in to Oakbrook Mall in Chicago, or The Oracle, in Reading, UK.

Is the mall security staff going to be any good? Are you kidding?

Fortunately no one has been injured in these latest attacks, although there were a few of these robberies in the last week, in fact. According to the “statistics”, store robberies are most likely to happen on a Monday morning between 8 and noon. Remind me to go to a Pilates class then!

Exercise could save your life! REALLY!!!

And then the sister of a friend of mine related this story. She was wearing a large ring, a CZ reproduction of some fabulous original, and a bunch of thugs came into her frame shop in Pretoria and held them all at gun point and robbed them. And one of the guys looked at her hand, took it up in his, and bit the stone out of her ring. And they left.

And of course my first thought is, “Thank God the robber wasn’t an Englishman -- he would have broken a tooth!”

Second thought is, of course, “Damn it! Poor Estelle!”

And what moral lesson can we learn from this South African story? Nothing, nothing, and nothing. You can be just running your life, running your business, doing your thing, and bad stuff happens. As Albert already well knows.