View From Our Flat Yesterday Morning

Living on the third floor of a block overlooking Stoke Newington High Street and the entrance to Abney Park cemetery we get to see and hear quite a bit: drug deals, crashing noises, prostitution, brawls, junkies injecting heroin, people cruising... and that's just inside our flat.

Sometimes we get disturbances outside as well, such as the firearms squad running round outside my supermarket & off-licence toting Uzi submachine guns (presumably issued by David Blunkett), naked shouting Councillors being bundled into police vans and even local kids on ASBOs taking pictures of Linda and me on their mobiles...

According to the email I've just received from Roger, our flat-sitter, Friday night was no exception to the general levels of "urban" excitement. Roger's friend Manfred was awoken at about 3am by what he claimed to be four gunshots - although apparently when Manfred describes something as "bang ....... bang, bang, bang followed by "ping whizz" you can never be quite sure what's happened.

In any event, Roger took this photo from the flat yesterday morning, inside the scene-of-crime blue tape area, and had to be logged in and out by the police to buy a Daily Mail, "Motorcycling Weekly" magazine, two croissants and a bunch of gladioli. He had to walk quite a distance as it turns out that the noise that they heard was a bullet ricocheting around inside Hamdy's newsagent and terrorist training camp. Luckily, Councillor Angus Mulready-Jones was not in the vicinity at the time.

A "fortunate miss" according to the Police...