15 Things Ex-MI6 Officers Teach British Seniors Living Alone to Keep Burglars Away at Night

The full checklist, written down: https://youtubebooks.net/gordonvale You are standing on your front path, half past nine, the street quiet. You turn round and look at your own house, not as the person who lives there, but as a stranger on the pavement would. The front room is lit up like a fish tank, the laptop is visible on the sill, and you can count every room that has a light on. That is not your home, that is a catalogue. The real cause of most break-ins is not a master criminal with a set of picks, it is a house that tells a story before the doorbell is even rung, and it was never your fault for believing a bright light was enough. The video covers fifteen of these quiet habits, and not one of them shows from the street. WHAT A MORTICE LOCK IS It is not the Yale latch that clicks shut behind you. A five-lever mortice is a solid steel bar, deadlocked into the frame of the door, and it cannot be slipped with a bit of plastic. The one property that makes it work is that it is mechanically dead until you turn the key, so there is no spring to manipulate from the outside. THE METHOD HOW TO LOCK UP PROPERLY AT NIGHT Put your actual hand on every door and every window lock before you go up. That takes about ninety seconds. Then throw the mortice deadbolt, not just the Yale night latch. If your front door is uPVC or composite, look for a three-star cylinder marked TS 007. Check that the garage door leading into the house is locked, because that is the one everybody leaves till last. When the lights come on inside, draw the curtains all the way across so a man on the pavement cannot count your rooms or see the one armchair and the one mug. Move the laptop, the telly, and the good silver off the window line so your front bay is not a shop display. Replace the big blazing bulb you leave on all night with a low, steady dusk-to-dawn light at the front door so your neighbours can see who is standing there. Fit motion-activated lights all the way round the sides and the back, especially the dark corner by the boiler flue and behind the shed. Plug a lamp and a radio into timers, set at different times, so the house sounds like a real person moving through it when you are out at the GP. Set the alarm every night if you have one, including the window sensors, because a sudden loud noise at the exact moment he needs silence sends plenty of them straight back out. If you are on a long lane or the edge of a village, fit a driveway alert so you know someone is approaching before they reach the door. HONEST WORDS A lock is only as good as the frame around it, so if your door is old and tired, have a look at that. A bright bulb burning all night is not what keeps you safe, it throws hard shadows to stand in and eventually turns into wallpaper that nobody on the street notices any more. Alarms, cameras, and monthly contracts are the last small layer on top, and I have stood in the wreckage of a house that had every piece of kit the catalogue sold. An alarm you do not set because the cat set it off is a smoke alarm with the battery out. WHO PROFITS The recurring monthly contract for a monitored alarm can run you twenty to thirty pounds a month, season after season. A basic motion light starts from about twelve pounds once, a plug-in timer is between four and eight pounds, and most of the habits on this list cost nothing at all. Tonight: walk to the end of your front path after dark, turn round, and read your own house. Tell me which of these you already do without thinking of it as security, and which one landed because you realised you had left it wide open. I read every one. #homesecurity #burglaryprevention #ukhomes