I hope no-one on here was directly affected by the recent events around London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere.
The shop below me, along with all others in the area, was told to close lunchtime Tuesday after a tense night Monday, watching the Reeves corner store burn (on sky news) only a couple of miles away, followed by shops with flats above also being burnt out in the North of Croydon, and reports of youths gathering in the high street just the other side of the Station at the back of me. Fortunately it appears they went on somewhere else (not for the area they went to).
Also fortuitously my colleague, who was the on call service engineer Monday evening, had been watching the events unfold in Ealing when he received a call-out to a club in Ealing, and phoned to postpone the call-out. I had to take a circuitous route the following morning to get there. The was still a broken window to the tyre place 2 doors down.
I am no stranger to being on call during riots as I was working (and living) in the Brixton area during both riots there, and drove into the midst of them then (not by design), but this seemed entirely different.
