I am not normally at home on a Tuesday night and am feeling slightly out of sync with it all. But these riots have started to affect my leafy part of North London. We don't have any mega expensive shops electrical shops on our high street. In fact we are a neighbourhood full of hairdressers, book shops, charity shops, pubs and restaurants. Why in the world would anyone want to riot here? Who knows? But they did. Last night, they smashed the window of the mobile phone shop on the corner. So today as I passed through at about 3pm, a few of the shops had started to board up their windows. The police presence was noticeable, having gone from the usual 2 bobbys on the beat, to a whopping 6, but in their own words, they are just there as a preventative measure. It is a strange feeling when my little world that I tend to think of as quite insular and self-sufficient, isn't so insular after all. We grew up in a London that had intermittent attacks on it by the IRA. I have very vivid memories of the coal minors strikes and the Brixton riots. My mother was a small child in the war and painfully remembers the blitz and the sound of bombs dropping on her London. These riots were the last thing that I expected my child to have to experience in her little life, but as Forrest Gump says, life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Shit happen, but since moving back here with my child there has been very little of it. So for that, I'm grateful. I think that it will be a very rare life that exists without ever experiencing any kind of disruption within the community that they live in, both on a macro and a micro level. But in the event that my child will have to go through some kind of unrest, I can only hope that she will take on board and understand that there are many innocent people who become unfortunate casualties of these disruptions and that it is our duty as part of the community, to help these people. So that being said, a dear friend has asked me to spread the word about donating any spare blankets, clothes, toys etc for the people made homeless by this mindless violence.
This is a time where we can all do our bit to help and each little bit, each individual effort when added together can make a difference.
