Luckily, they failed to gain access to the property but to be the victim of acquisitive crime (I was burgled in 2006 and my car was broken into last year) is a dispiriting experience. The feeling that an amoral and mindless moron has invaded my property and damaged it in the process is distressing.

That said, I cannot praise the efforts of Cambridgeshire police enough. They were prompt, sympathetic and professional – especially the female police officer and scenes of crime officer who came to my home last weekend.

My sense is that people are no longer prepared to write-off residential burglaries – either in the city or villages near Peterborough – as just an occupational hazard.

I believe that there is increasingly real anger at the system which allows perennial burglars, in particular, to remain at large, perpetrating their grubby trade.



So you will no doubt understand my feelings when on Saturday I read in the Evening Telegraph that Judge Nicholas Coleman had agreed to give a prolific burglar – read low life criminal – "one last chance" in refusing to jail him.

We were invited to commend the fact that this individual had admitted to 17 burglaries (and dozens of other crimes) and was "forced" into crime by his addiction to hard drugs. On a scale of one to 10, my sympathies might lay with widowed pensioners, disabled children, hard working but poorly paid families but no, we have to give a little cheer to a ruthless habitual loser who systematically spreads misery wherever he casts his shadow – and usually in areas where folk don't have a lot anyway.

And we have to regard hard drug use like an accident that somehow afflicts one, rather than a selfish and destructive lifestyle choice?

I have met Judge Nicholas Coleman. You are unlikely to encounter a more pleasant and civilised gentleman.

But I really do wonder whether the judiciary understand the anger and impotence many people feel at these sort of derisory sentences and the corrosive effect it has on their faith in British justice. What message does it send to law abiding youngsters, to people who work hard and obey the rules, and to the victims of crime, like me?

Once people have no more faith in the law and the righting of wrongs, that way lies anarchy.

Do our judges care?