I had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen from a pub in Euston a couple of years ago. All that remained in my pockets was my phone & power bank, and airpods. It was stolen by a guy who went into the pub we were at, sat at an adjacent table, pretended to study the menu, deposited a dummy backpack to the communal pile under our table when we were standing to greet people, then picked up the heaviest one (mine) and walked out. Unlike the author, I wasn't black-out drunk, we were just distracted and someone was able to do a sleight of hand when we weren't paying attention.

The author is very lucky to get theirs back. I had to replace it all. As they say, replacing the UK one wasn't too bad - though I hadn't been in the UK for 2 years by that point so I had to get extra guarantors to sign photos and write a declaration. The other one was a nightmare, and by pure luck the embassy could look up my last application and pull the birth certificate reference number for me. Again, 2 guarantors and I was very lucky to have a friend from that country visiting.

I reported it as stolen, hoping that they'd steal the laptop and wallet and then ditch the rest. Unfortunately, either nobody found it or nobody turned it in. Of course, the CCTV that was in the pub was 'too blurry' to be of any use. CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard.

In my case, I crashed at a friend's place that evening, and then went down to my local makerspace for lack of wanting to pay a locksmith £fuckloads to unlock my door on a Sunday. By pure luck, there was a lockpicking nerd there and they came and slipped my door for me. Thankfully, that was enough to help offset a lot of the negativity of the whole affair. I felt like I got off lucky a bit, and didn't dwell so much on it as a result.