England, my England

I don’t know the Hay Mills and Washwood Heath parts of Birmingham very well, but when the morning news came in of those dawn raids and the arrests Yasin Hassan Omar and his chums, it was all feeling too close to home again.

Later I found out that my uncle George is doing a painting and decorating job in the street next to one of the evacuated roads. At one point the police asked for his step-ladder to look up in the loft of a house, but told him not to worry as it was not related to the ongoing situation. The police do a lot of that I suspect, arrest suicide bombers and then use the opportunity to have a random nose up someone’s loft.

Anyway, evacuated residents were apparently hoarded onto the Asda carpark, and my uncle got chatting to one woman who said she had seen one of the men arrested jumping over a couple of back garden fences before being cornered. Don’t know if this is true mind.

Whilst all of this was going on, I was spending the day having a mosey around Bakewell in Derbyshire. For a small town Bakewell’s got several good bookshops and as many cake shops and bakeries as any decent person could wish for. The threat from terrorism seemed as remote as the moon. It’s hard to feel threatened when you’re drinking tea from a tea-pot in a 17th century house and eating crumpets with melted butter and jam.