I happened to be awake at 5am this morning. Now, Reading is a fairly peaceful place, but it does have the very occasional problem with violence – stabbings and such. I guess any town does. I live in a fairly dodgy area – Newtown – but I've never seen any problems here at all. Mandela Court, just round the corner, has a reputation for being the drug centre of Reading, but apart from the occasional visit by the police it seems pretty quiet to me. Certainly I don't feel unsafe walking past it.
But at 5am this morning, I heard what sounded suspiciously like a gunshot. We don't have guns in the UK, not like in the US. The only people to have guns here are the police, criminals, the army and enthusiasts, so I'm not hugely familiar with the sound of gunfire. I can tell you it certainly wasn't a car backfiring – it was way to close for that and as I live at the end of a cul-de-sac which is at the end of a road that comes off the end of another road, it can't have been a randomly passing car as cars simply can't randomly pass here. I'm also pretty sure it wasn't a firework. In my experience, people who let fireworks off do not do just the one at 5am. Plus fireworks are a more, er, voluminous sound, if you know what I mean. More of a ba-a-ang than a bang. And it wasn't someone popping a crisp packet next to my ear, nor was it a dream as I was awake a good few minutes before it happened.
Which leads me to one uncomfortable conclusion.
Now, I suppose if you're an American reading this, you're probably thinking, 'oh, big deal', but I have to admit the thought of someone firing a gun anywhere within earshot (no pun intended, honest) of me does kinda freak me out a bit. This is England. We don't have gun crime like you do in the States and although it is on the rise, it's the exception rather than the rule. And I view guns as nasty, evil things that should quite definitely remain out of the general public's hands.
I don't suppose I'll find out exactly what happened, if indeed anything actually did. Not sure I want to.
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