British response to incidents

Yesterday part of London was on lock down following a flurry of reports of shots being fired. There was mass panic as people fled for their safety.

From within the panic though, there were some good tweets, as Twitter has highlighted:

A very British response to Oxford Circus incident 🇬🇧


The above reminds me a little of this one, from the June 2017 London Bridge Attack (also note the woman on the right, who never seems to get mentioned yet is also carrying a drink):

The hero London needs - the man who wouldn't let terrorism interrupt his pint pic.twitter.com/kgoXCE9IqH

— Jack Hillcox (@JackHillcox) June 4, 2017

Yes, terrorism is a dreadful, awful thing, and we are all now perhaps not as comfortable in our surroundings as we once were - but that doesn't mean that we can't identify humour within events, either.

And as a northerner, I can say with certainty that beer in London is bloody expensive!

Before I go, it is the Black Friday weekend, and everything in my wife's Etsy shop is discounted by 10%, so please do stop by www.denkaidesigns.com and take a look at her range of needle minders, ideal for those cross stitchers in your life :)

And Pokey Hole, the campaign that Kickstarter tried to stop, is still live too, just £1 will get you a digital copy of the rules for Pokey Hole!

Shopping on Black Friday

Friday morning I was out getting a few bits and pieces - we wanted a new kettle and iron, some household staples (aka milk and yoghurt - although I don't actually have any staples in the house) plus a couple of things for my other half who was helping at a Christmas fair in the afternoon.

Now, Black Friday is a phenomenon popular in the USA, being on the day after Thanksgiving, but as we don't as a rule celebrate Thanksgiving in the UK I didn't really think about it.

Well, I went to Asda (large UK supermarket, owned by Walmart) for some of the things on my list, which is normally open 24 hours a day, and was very excited to see people queueing to get in.  Without any prompting I happily joined the end of the queue - about sixtieth, I worked out - to get in.  I think there is some about British people and queueing, when we're not under any immediate time pressures to be anywhere else, we do like a good queue.  There's any number of great things about a queue:

• It's a social situation where we're allowed to communicate with strangers (about queue-related topics) - whilst we normally steer well clear of any kind of social contact with those folk that we are yet to be formally introduced, the novelty of an unexpected queue can stir us into discussion;
• We can assess just how far back we are in the queue, and try to estimate how long it will take us to get to the front;
• You can squint at the sky (grey) and extract a hand from its protective pocket / glove to see if the sky is releasing rain - if so, you are free to frown, and;
• You can telephone friends and family members to complain about the queue (as the fellow behind me in the queue seemed to manage to do for about 15 minutes straight, over 3 or 4 separate telephone conversations)

You also get to tweet and Facebook about the queue in question:

I feel rather guilty about this because I didn't actually have a value breakfast, I was just making a joke, but I didn't want to disappoint Beth - sorry Beth. This was possibly the first time I pretended that I did have a fried breakfast rather than pretending that I haven't. 

We even had two Police Community Support Officers turn up to backup the security guard on duty, who appeared to be held up by an older gentleman who was certainly talking to him for the full twenty minutes that I was queueing, and quite possibly longer.

In the end I didn't actually buy anything from the Black Friday offers, but I still got to queue up and it was fun (but don't tell anyone I admitted to that!)

Did you go shopping on Black Friday?  Let me know in the comments.