The first time our place got burgled we were in our old flat and had hired a cleaner who cleaned us out. That felt bad, in a bruising sort of way, because it turned out I’d paid her £25 to rob us. This time was less bad: I returned home a few nights ago to an empty house, tripped into my bedroom to find it tipped on its side, then heard a noise downstairs as the rest of the back door fell in and thought, oh, so this is how I die. He’d taken our Christmas presents and my computer, and he’d trodden mud all over our pillows looking for cash hidden in the curtain rail. Apparently people hide cash in the curtain rail! But it was less bad, less personal, and this meant I was able to pay closer attention.

Most robberies don’t happen at night, as assumed, but between 3pm and 5pm, during school pick-up time

The policeman and I were crouching in the spare room, looking at a muddy footprint. Then he stood up, and said: “You need to have more kids.” It’s not the first time a person has told me how to do fertility and it won’t be the last, but this time it threw me slightly. Would they not have robbed us if we’d had more kids? Was this one of the unknown truths of a criminal mind that the more children living in a property the less of value inside? It makes sense, I thought. For one thing everything’s plastic; for another, diamonds are a choking risk.

Unattractive places are less likely to be broken into. So now we should pebbledash our lovely house?

When he was taking my statement at the kitchen table later he asked if I employed a nanny, and my mum, having arrived to help me check the burglar had gone, cleared her throat, pointedly. “No, we rely on my mother for a lot of the childcare, and we’re very grateful for everything she does,” I said in a monotone. “Let it be added to the statement.” Up in the spare room I started to stutter the reasons we’d only had one child, until the policeman cheerily explained, “But you’ve got all this space!” he said. “You should have more kids to fill it!” And because I was still me, obviously I apologised.

The only way to prevent your house being broken into is to make it look less attractive

We moved in at the beginning of September, a van taking our furniture maybe five doors down the road. After two years of trying to buy a house and weaving whole lives into the linings of strangers’ flats, the parties we’d have, the chickens we’d roast, then having to bury the whole idea when the estate agent called with their chirpy “no”. Of viewing derelict houses that you’d wrinkle your nose through until you got to the single armchair, the kettle, and realised a person had been left alone eating Cup-a-Soups for a decade by the son now trying to sell it for half a million pounds. The process wrung me dry of hope. Until, one day I met our neighbour, whose sale, it turned out, had fallen through. And over a cup of tea in her kitchen we worked out how we could afford to buy her house. The humanness of the whole thing was sort of breathtaking, after all that time grunting through Rightmove and men we didn’t trust; it was a conversation, not a game. Every time we approach the place now, the porch light illuminating some sort of future, we are reminded of our exquisite luck. And now, what, the police want us to pebbledash it?

A SOCO is a scene of crime officer who gathers forensic evidence. You must not clean up until they arrive

By the time the woman from forensics turned up, tough and immaculate, with cat’s-eye glasses and the demeanour of a pub landlord, it was getting dark. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, her radio fizzing away with its own short stories as she crunched through the broken glass to dust a large Nike footprint. “I’ve just come from a massive shooting in Brent.” Obviously, I apologised again.

Most people hide cash and jewellery in their bedroom

We had neither cash nor jewellery, and the burglar seemed a little confused at this absence, opening jars of face cream and going through my partner’s vinyl records. That night, sadly putting his 7in singles back in their box, he sat heavily on the bed and said: “But I wonder what he thought of us.”

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman