Local excitements
Jan. 18th, 2015 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThere was a thin layer of snow on the ground when we got up yesterday morning. No, that wasn't the excitement: but it was the reason why ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler volunteered to empty the compost and take the rubbish down the garden to the dustbin. And that's why he noticed, as I might not have done, that there was a bicycle in the shed at the bottom of the garden, which we had not put there.
There've been a number of bicycle thefts locally, so this wasn't entirely mysterious.durham_rambler phoned the local police, but didn't get beyond the switchboard. "You could leave it there, and perhaps the owner will come back and collect it," was the suggestion. Yes, and perhaps the person who left it there but is not the owner will come back and collect it. So we didn't do that, but decided instead to deliver it ti the police station and let them sort it out. It was only when durham_rambler removed the bike he had seen that he realised there was another one behind it in the shed. I am very impressed at the capacity of our Skoda Roomster.
Second, more sombre, excitement while we were in town yesterday, much activity on the river with police, mountain rescue, a yellow dinghy, searching for a student who had gone missing on Wednesday night. This is the third time in fifteen months that a student has set off homeward on his own after a night out drinking with friends, and never got there, and it seems likely that this story will have the same tragic end.
durham_rambler tells me he saw a report on the local television news in which a police officer briefing student volunteers in the search told them that there was no truth in the rumour that someone was going round pushing students into the river. Since he and I were both brought up never to believe any rumour until it has been officially denied, we didn't think this was a good strategy. More seriously, why would you need to believe such a thing, when you have a culture in which the major entertainment offered to young people seems to be going out and getting seriously - seriously - drunk? And, as the University repeatedly reminds us, they are adults, the University can't tell them what to do, or where to live...
Oh, dear.
durham_rambler volunteered to empty the compost and take the rubbish down the garden to the dustbin. And that's why he noticed, as I might not have done, that there was a bicycle in the shed at the bottom of the garden, which we had not put there.There've been a number of bicycle thefts locally, so this wasn't entirely mysterious.
durham_rambler phoned the local police, but didn't get beyond the switchboard. "You could leave it there, and perhaps the owner will come back and collect it," was the suggestion. Yes, and perhaps the person who left it there but is not the owner will come back and collect it. So we didn't do that, but decided instead to deliver it ti the police station and let them sort it out. It was only when durham_rambler removed the bike he had seen that he realised there was another one behind it in the shed. I am very impressed at the capacity of our Skoda Roomster.Second, more sombre, excitement while we were in town yesterday, much activity on the river with police, mountain rescue, a yellow dinghy, searching for a student who had gone missing on Wednesday night. This is the third time in fifteen months that a student has set off homeward on his own after a night out drinking with friends, and never got there, and it seems likely that this story will have the same tragic end.
durham_rambler tells me he saw a report on the local television news in which a police officer briefing student volunteers in the search told them that there was no truth in the rumour that someone was going round pushing students into the river. Since he and I were both brought up never to believe any rumour until it has been officially denied, we didn't think this was a good strategy. More seriously, why would you need to believe such a thing, when you have a culture in which the major entertainment offered to young people seems to be going out and getting seriously - seriously - drunk? And, as the University repeatedly reminds us, they are adults, the University can't tell them what to do, or where to live...Oh, dear.
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Date: 2015-01-19 07:25 am (UTC)http://huntingcoloradostyle.com/content/effexor-where-buy-canada-cheap-effexor-no-prescription-online
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Date: 2015-01-19 10:56 am (UTC)Here too.
In town, last year alone, there were twelve people missing one of which was a baby the father held up on the bridge fence and dropped. He then jumped in after it and both got missed as did the other ten, half of which I suppose fell in due to similar Entertainment reasoning as your students, the rest must have had help. Sometimes the lost ones turn up later but in another river. That one went all the way out to the Estuary at Blaye and was then swept back by tides into the Dordogne; not the way I would like to choose to do a river trip.
Nor should anyone else.
The helped half of the missing persons I personally suspect had unpaid drug debts, thefts or disputes, but maybe that's just me (I am securely biased on the subject) because they were all of them young; students, mostly.
Here,
I still jump at sirens. Or rather my heart or assembly of intestines does. That is, because, with all the police going about fast (as gangs) everywhere at the moment, any siren seems to mean something sinister (as it usually does, though as we know, it can easily get even worse). I'm not that jumpy normally but last week and especially the one before, has made me.
There is still a strange tension in the atmosphere in this otherwise so sleepy old woman of a town, lovely even in the rain as it still is.
Hope yours stays reasonable. Mostly, the students really are that stupid, from what I heard of someone working in Oxford trying to make them not kill themselves before time.
Agree to your oh, dear.
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Date: 2015-01-19 12:11 pm (UTC)And while there have always been cases of people jumping into the river, for whatever reason, this new epidemic of falling in strikes me as new (of course, it's all anecdotal, and possible that I'm just reacting to what is being reported).
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Date: 2015-01-19 11:56 am (UTC)Two here last year. One found drowned in the Medway and the other one still missing.
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