MURDER! BASEMENTS! FOXES!
Some time around September 2 years ago I had just moved to St.Pauls in Bristol... a slightly rough area (well, it was knives rather than guns), but it was cheap and we were living in a Withnail-style 4 storey georgian mansion for £bugger all a month.
On the whole it was great, but there were a few unnerving moments during the year we lived there, but there were a couple that stuck in my mind...

my bedroom was in the basement, cold and damp with a large window beneath street level- outside of this window was a... how to describe it? a concrete subterranean balcony i suppose- which at night managed to amplify the assorted light screaming/ hellish cackles (crackles maybe?) of the crackheads who emerged from the shadows at about 1am. the acoustics meant it was like the screaming was INSIDE my room. especially the time I was woken up by an attempted rape in the garden opposite. the attacker even said, and I swear to god, " well if you don't have the money, you'll have to pay me some other way". I didn't know people actually said that. that's just a standard post-watershed ITV 'depraved mobster #3' line, isn't it?

so. the morning in question I remember waking to the crowing of the neighbourhood cockerel (yes. there was a cockerel somewhere in St.Pauls), then ambling upstairs to the first floor living room with a cup of tea to see about rolling a fag and finding the remote... when through the window I espied what must have been 20 white boiler suited coppers doing an eerily silent minute-detail search of my street where 100 yards either side of my house had been cordoned off.

there wasn't a body, but figured it must have been a murder with all the forensic folks and there may have been hideous still-wet pools of blood and 'help me oh god why won't you help me?' written in entrails... but I may have just made that up. anyway.
so I did what anyone else would do- woke everyone up, switched on every radio, computer, TV and internet receiving implement in the house to find out what was happening, and found out that some guy was quietly stabbed next to our corner shop. the thing was that we had been out that previous night, and we later found that minutes before we had closed the front door behind us (I remember looking at the time on my phone), the poor soul had been violently pushed off this mortal coil. it was made more poignant, however, that we had been spitting (as I believe the kids say) Beastie Boys lyrics quite loudly... throwing the hip-hoppin' arm shapes (oh god) and had been doing this all down the road.

I can only hope to god that as this man was being brutally slain, he didn't see the whitest, geekiest students in Bristol silhouetted against the clear night sky with me reciting 'get it together' word for word, carrying my high heels and maybe a kebab and not seeing a fucking thing.

there was a stabbing nearly every week after that for a little while... (not all fatal and all dealers I'm told. which apparantly doesn't warrant much media coverage). who knows what it was all about, but we soon got pretty jaded and only noticed because the corner shop would be closed and we'd have to go to the one further up on the main road.

the only time we ever actually stopped to notice anything was when one of the dealers we had seen a lot came up to my housemate looking a bit shifty and said something inaudible yet threatening; but my dear housemate (I shall call him Jamie, as I regularly do) looked straight over his shoulder, cried 'look! a fox!' waving his pointed finger with toddler-like enthusiasm. the 5 or so resident crack dealers on the corner then all started talking with similar enthusiasm about how "that was a big fox for 'round here" and "I've seen a few of em recently" etc. Jamie then ran in to tell the household about the fox sighting and so possibly avoided a mugging.
it makes you wonder..... are they dealers and crackheads? or do they have 'i-spy' wildlife or Bill Oddie books in their coats. maybe they're just aspiring misunderstood naturalists. in my world they are...

I'm off to re-lurk now.
in a far less stabby neighbourhood.
(missmissy, Sat 16 Feb 2008, 23:29, 6 replies)

cock
I bet it was the cockerel from the St. Werburgh's City Farm. I love how Bristol does nature and inner city crime.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Sun 17 Feb 2008, 1:07, closed)

heh
brings back memories - I used to live round the corner from st pauls, and could hear that sodding cockerel.

Got woken up at 5am by police storming though the house one morning, and straight out the back door, cutting off the escape route of the druggies they were raiding next door. Weird how you can normalise all that shit.
(inflateable, Sun 17 Feb 2008, 10:57, closed)

You get a cock-a-doodle-click!
Gawd bless everyone who writes about Bristol.

I remember years ago when I was walking along City Road (towards Stoke Croft) and I was approached by a young man with base-ball cap and the gangster bounce in his step.

His opening gambit towards me?

'Cha! Blood, whats your problem boy?'

To which I replied...

'If you were less predictable you'd have a much better result'

He walked off looking confused.
( JeffTheDogFucker Can you dig it?, Sun 17 Feb 2008, 18:14, closed)

If i ever get mugged I'm going to try that.
"Give us yer wallet."
"Oh look. A fox"
"Where...Ere! Where's he gone?"
(Big D, Sun 17 Feb 2008, 18:57, closed)

st pauls...
isnt that a ghetto?
(Lovefist233 Bothering Sheep since..., Sun 17 Feb 2008, 20:11, closed)

^
Ghetto vs. up-and-coming... I'm just waiting for the Stokes Croft redevelopment to kick in and boost my house price dramatically. It's still as shit as ever though.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Sun 17 Feb 2008, 21:38, closed)