My Brush With Justice

I live in a nice part of town. We have an LE2 postcode, an organic deli, a second-hand bookshop and though we don't have our own Starbucks, we could easily have one of anyone wanted to open one.

We moved to this nice part of town, Emma and I, after we tired of our old flat in the less salubrious surroundings of LE5. It was a bit, well, grim. A 1970's block, designed just after the trend in buildings moved from the accomodating to the small. The bathroom was permanently mouldy, no matter how much 3 in 1 Anti-Mould product we threw at it. No light, no air, some fucker's bike always in the way of the stairs, a part time knocking shop upstairs (weekends only, £30 with a condom, £50 without), it goes on. Instead of the deli was a McDrivethrough, and instead of the ur-Starbucks there was a pub called The Poolcue and Glassing. And so one day, we left.

Now we have light, no mould and proper central heating. The cat can't go out as we're on the third floor, but otherwise, it's lovely. I'd post a picture, but I have to hoover. Summer was here, life was sweet. But with the coming of winter, today saw the jarring end of the honeymoon period.

Because we live in a broken society. A friend on Facebook said that now Yahoo have redeisgned their homepage (presumably from deliberately awful to a mere thoughtlessly rubbish) she is daily confronted with the Daily Mail headline feed. This ruins her mornings, she says, as it invariably ends with her shaking with rage at the evil of it all. I say it's like picking a scab - as lomg as it hurts, you're still alive.

But it's true, things ain't what they used to be. I am 30, and remember long hot summers, playing outside, the Atari Lynx. A happier time, when policemen could murder black people with impunity and child abuse was kept behind closed doors instead of being paraded about on the front pages of right-wing tabloids. A simpler time, when it snowed at Christmas and England lost the Ashes for eighteen years in a row. Now of course England win things and there's no snow any more, apart from last year when it did snow, and all us nostalgics were forced to learn that it's not all a winter wonderland, especially on a dual carriageway at 7:30am and everyone is stuck in the ruts left by the car in front with a running gap of nine feet and a stopping distance of eleven hundred yards. Most of all though, there's the spectre of drugs.

Drugs. Just let the word fill you with dread. Drugs. Remember Danny in Grange Hill dying of an overdose of drugs in the back of Mr. Bronson's Austin Maestro in 1986? Yeah. Drugs. In italics. I'm a man of the world, though. I went to university. I've seen marijuana being consumed. I found it made me feel a bit dizzy, then fall asleep. But some people do like a bit. And where there is demand, there will surely be supply. After all, people actually spent money to vote for Jedward long after it stopped being funny and started to get a bit sinister. And today, the supplying was going on in our flats.

For fuck sakes. We moved precisely to get away from this. The life of a drug dealer isn't like Denzil Washington in American Gangster. It's more Rigsby from Rising Damp, only without lusting after Frances De La Tour. I've seen more than my fair share of minor hashish deals go down, and to come home from work to find two nervous looking guys lurking by the lifts and skinning up a doobie was more than I wanted to see. These two guys in particular have been getting closer to our communal front door for a while. During the summer they were in the car park, transacting their business in the shade of a fruit tree. Come autumn it was in a car in the visitors bay, and now this. Dealing in the corridor. Christ.

So I rang the Police, like the civic minded individual I am. Like I said, I'm 30. Dial the two's, and then go and see Alec, our building warden. And when he went down to see whether they were still there, not only were they still there, but they were having to explain themselves to a couple of coppers. The system works. Fuck yeah. Unless the police were just after an ounce themselves. We can't rule it out. Like I said. Broken Britain.

Keep 'em peeled, as Shaw Taylor used to say.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Doug