Subject: Headaches and Muggings...
From: Alex Kemp
Date: Monday, 21 January 2002 00:00:00 +0000
To: All

Note before: This is an old “Diary Entry” from the Modem-Help site, re-jigged into the etmg format. The original site is now long gone.


Saturday evening was a bad one, at home with a foul headache. Began to suspect carbon monoxide poisoning from the back-boiler, although it shouldn’t be, since all was checked before the cold weather arrived.

Got into work on Sunday (Sunday is the first day of my working week) still with a low-level background headache reducing my vitality & found work colleagues with their own variant of the same problem. As one example, one chap has been having increasing aggravation from his next-door neighbour which recently included being towards his wife & children, then culminated in threats towards the house and apparent attacks, consisting of garden mud & refuse thrown over the windows & brickwork. My colleague installed security cameras and, sure enough, caught his neighbour in the act. Police had been called in during the weekend & the neighbour cautioned at the police station. My colleague, of course, was full of the worry, concern & aggravation of the whole affair.

During a cigarette break I come upon a conversation just as a 20 year old colleague states that his experience of his teenage years in Reading was of being mugged 7 times, twice with a gun, other times with a knife, and always in the town centre. The modus operandi was always to push the victim into a shop doorway, and demand money. This conversation led to a much older colleague tell me on the Monday of some of his experiences working a Fruit ‘n’ Veg market near Kray territory in the ’60s (in London). He stated that the Krays kept the peace in the area, and also that the nearby Carnival was started to diffuse some of the intense race-related problems that were building up (tit-for-tat shot-gunning of people waiting for a bus was his example).

Certainly, all these topics of conversation matched my state of health, and the nature of phone calls taken during Sunday evening also (horrible). This seems to be life today, and I would hesitate to put the title “Civilisation” to it.

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Alex Kemp