The ten minute walk between my office building and the local shopping precinct can be an interesting journey. Sometimes, you'll pass a few people crowded on and around a bench drinking cider and shouting at each other. Sometimes, you'll see a car park attendant scuttling away from the general area of the local sex shop with a DVD box shaped plain package clutched tightly under his arm.* Mostly, you'll pass fellow office workers, strolling back from a sandwich shop and the drunks heading towards the benches, with their cide in hand. Sometimes, there is a string of events like there was today.
There is a police van, one of those giant yellow ones that house an entire troop of officers (what is the collective noun, I wonder?). It is parked right on the corner of the street with the methadone chemist on one side and the housing association on the opposite side. There are four officers, two of them walk a woman in handcuffs around to the back of the van and help her to clamber in. Another clutches some clothes, while the fourth talks to a man in his twenties who sits, perched on the window ledge of a restaurant. I have my earphones in so I can't hear what's being said but I am aware there is a strange air of calmness, the woman isn't putting up a fight and the man on the window ledge seems to be engaging with the officer talking to him. I carry on walking, on the next corner three teenage girls stare, they've presumably witnessed the whole spectacle and, satisfied that it's come to an end, they start to make their way in the opposite direction. Each one glances over her shoulder to make sure she's not missed anything.
Around the corner something stops me in my tracks, I catch a glimpse of a neon car peeking out from behind a big white van. I take a second look and realise the car is covered in some kind of hairy fabric, the strands moving about in the breeze. Two men stand nearby, they don't seem to be confused, they admire it, they look at it as if it's the most normal optional extra you could get on a car (if it was normal, I'd have leopard). It's parked outside a bar that's opening soon, it must be part of their advertising campaign and it's crying out for a photograph...
Across the road, as I get closer to the shops an elderly man careers past mere millimetres away from me on his mobility scooter, startled, I look up and that's when I notice them. Hoards of people, dozens of them spilling out of the shops and the bingo all just ahead of me, then I notice the fire engine inching its way through the car park. I don't see any flames or smoke but I do see the bewildered people, customers, employees, casual onlookers, nobody quite sure what they should do now. I carry on, past the people standing at their fire assembly points, I walk past one of the evacuated shops and there I spot the best thing I've seen so far, a pair of women who, instead of fleeing the potential fire, have taken the opportunity to have a sit down on the garden chairs that are on display outside a shop which might just be on fire.
*Ok, so this only happened once but it's always amused me, the slightly shifty look in his eye and the speed at which he walked away, desperate to get out of the vicinity.
