crazy days

Life was starting to feel little crazy here before the events of this week. There are quite a few things going on that I'd intended to blog about, but then this mania sweeps through my neighbourhood, and the rest of the week has rattled by in a state of shock.

Now that I come to write about it I feel so inarticulate. When I came home from work on Monday the high street was in the process of boarding up. Even Oli's, my local twenty four hour doesn't close for Christmas shop, was shut up. At six o'clock I stood in my front room and watched two waves of kids silently run up the street. There weren't even that many. If the street had been clogged up with the 500 people who actually live here, would they have given up and gone home?

We were held to ransom by a minority ferrying stolen goods up the street, or hiding things in the church yard while they waited for friends with cars to transport them away.

I've long known that my flight reflex is infinitely stronger than my inclination to fight. When folk started rowing over their loot directly outside my front door I left. Who wants to be a sitting duck if somebody starts a a fire? As I went I wondered what I really couldn't live without, and the only thing that sprang to mind was that life might be a little tricky without my passport. Maybe I'm not as materialistic as I'd thought. My neighbours said I was mad to go outside. I certainly felt safer once I'd left. Nobody paid me the blindest bit of attention, and London is a great place for running and hiding.

I stayed with friends.

There's been so much commentary on the why's and wherefores of these events. Maybe metropolitan Londoners have something in their psychology that just resets and starts over, and it's just small town Kiwi chicks that find these events so word snatchingly inexplicable.