Chronicle 2014

by Andrew Woodmaker

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  That’s it. I think I like it. I just wish I could have got a government comment before it was too late. It would have rounded the article off nicely.

  Afternoon

  Lunchtime, and the print run is back from Oxford and on the vans being distributed as I type this. There have been some changes, but not too many, I won’t mention them here, after all, I’m sure that they’ll be archived somewhere if you want to see the finished product. This is more about my personal account, the article I record here is the article I wrote, as I wrote it, unedited.

  I haven’t had time to sit on my backside all day though, I have a new exciting story to cover this afternoon. The local council is removing the traffic lights at the junction of High Street and Station Road, apparently to improve traffic flow, and locals are complaining about safety. Yes, I said exciting. The more I say it the more I believe it. Maybe.

  Evening

  Ohhh what a week, what a long and excellent week. I am home. I am done for the week. Adiós diary, I’ll see you tomorrow.

  Monday, March 31st 2014

  You know, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll spend more time focusing on the more important things. It’s all well and good being thorough, putting everything down in my diary, but really, how exciting a read will it make to people who’re going to be reading this in the future. OK, new plan.

  Evening

  Today was much more exciting, I bribed one of the local police to tell me about suspected corruption in the local force. I was given a file of papers to read that should prove that the corruption goes right up to the top of the Oxfordshire force. The chief constable’s name is in there too, this is going to be huge! As I was leaving with the papers, one of the police who is named in the file put a gun in my back and had me hand them over. Little did he know I’d already emailed copies to myself. He let me walk away, thinking he was safe. Now let the story begin!

  Tuesday, April 1st 2014

  OK, OK, so yesterday was a complete and utter lie!

  I didn’t bribe anyone, I didn’t get any papers, I’ve never even seen a real gun in my life, and if there is corruption in the Didcot police department, it stops for lunch every day. They just don’t seem the type. I just wanted to spice things up a little. My stories this week about a traffic light removal, a dog being shaved bald by an angry neighbour, and horror of horrors, shortages of stock at the ice cream shop on the high street, just bored me to tears.

  Yesterdays story is how life should be, lots of excitement and adventure. Maybe I’ll write a book instead of a diary, a fiction book, about a spy, something like The Spy who Saved Everyone by Andrew Woodmaker.

  Wow, that’s a bad title. That’s a really bad title. Let’s not call it that. In fact, lets try and concentrate on the day job for now. Payday today, and the money didn’t exactly set my head on fire with joy. I know it wasn’t even a full month, but with living costs as they are, and taxes having gone up a couple of months ago - again - it didn’t even reach £1,000. It’s going to be tight next month. Most of my savings have gone on the move to Didcot, and with Taima out of work until she finds something, I don’t think we’ll be out having steak dinners every night, or clubbing in expensive clubs (I hate clubbing anyway).

  Today I spent most of the day in the office working on the three stories for the week’s edition. They’re all complete, and I’m free to get a bit of a head start for next editions stories. No real clue what they’ll be about yet. I was hoping by now I’d get a response from the government about the Reaction Engines story, but nope, nothing. If I don’t get something soon, I’ll send in a Freedom of Information request and ask what the reasons have been to justify not funding such a major project.

  Thursday, April 3rd 2014

  Whoops, I didn’t get to record yesterday’s events as I left my pad on the sofa instead of on the charger in the coffee table overnight. It was dead as a dodo when I went to use it last night. I’m looking forwards to the new batteries that were announced last year. Really long life, and should keep my pad running for a month on a single charge. Not bad, shame you can’t buy them yet. The surface chargers are better than having to plug things in, just leave them on a charging surface, come back in the morning, it’s done. But it’s too easy, it makes it so much easier to forget to do it. Back when you had to plug in a cable, all of last year, you really knew you’d forgotten something when you didn’t do it.

  Anyway, yesterday was a bust, no new stories. I went into Oxford today to try and get some new juicy gossip, but I don’t know my way round Oxford any more than I know Didcot - well, even less now I’m getting to know Didcot a little. To be quite honest, I spent about three hours wandering round the town centre, window shopping, trying to pick some things for my parents’ birthdays next week. I got my mum a set of tea and coffee jars for the kitchen, I think she’ll like them. If I remember correctly, I think they even match the kitchen!

  Got home and Taima was a bit down, not sure why, she didn’t want to talk about it. I suspect lack of job and money isn’t helping. I bought a takeaway from the Chinese to cheer her up, and it seemed to help a bit, but she seemed preoccupied all night.

  Friday, April 4th 2014

  Got at least some story, more on the ever so exciting trees on the rail embankment. Caught a rail company engineer poking around up there. It was complete coincidence, I was walking back to the office, and saw one of their vans parked up, so I wandered over and had a chat with him. He said it was happening all over. They still aren’t sure, but the big train crash last year, where 30 people died when a train left the rails at high speed and went down an embankment, they suspect that subsidence caused by tree roots was the cause. I said I thought that trees would make the embankment stronger, the roots would help to keep it all stable, but apparently not, although he admitted he didn’t know quite why or how, his job was just to plan the chopping down to make sure no houses get squashed.

  So, I’ll write about that. It is fairly big news in a small town.

  Saturday, April 5th 2014

  Weekend, and I had a bit of an uncomfortable day. I finally got to the bottom of what was bothering Taima all week. Apparently she went out to the job centre, and was given some abuse by some of the local chavs. In a town with the demographics of Didcot, dark skin is a bit of a rarity, and they got a bit abusive.

  I guess living in London for the last four years at uni, we’d kindof got used to people not really caring what colour her skin was, or that mine was white and didn’t match. Small town Oxfordshire I guess isn’t quite as evolved in some ways.

  We talked about it, even discussed moving away from the area. Do we really want to live in an area where people have that kind of attitude? But, between us, more her than me to be honest, we decided to stay. It had to be her choice, if I’d tried to force the issue, well, we’d probably have stayed and she’d have resented it. That’s never a good thing.

  I’ve started to do pretty much the only thing I can do, I’m going to write an article about it. Not about her specifically, but about attitudes in predominantly white areas to non-white people. I expect I’ll cause quite the uproar, but I’m up for a fight over it. Not a fight fight, I don’t do that - probably because the last fight I was in when I was a kid I almost lost an eye - but a verbal fight, a bit of controversy. Excellent.

  Early night tonight, we’re off to Coventry for my parents birthdays tomorrow. That’s one of the best things about them having birthdays on adjacent days, only one trip needed. Still no idea of my dads birthday present, I’ll have to stop in town in Cov and pick something up.

  Sunday, April 6th 2014

  On the train on the way in. Taima just kicked me quite hard when I beat her for the fourth time in a row at noughts and crosses. I’m fairly sure she didn’t mean it to hurt, and she felt guilty afterwards when she realised it really had. I’m probably going to be limping all day. Well, maybe, but even if not, I’ll probably fake it, I can milk this for a while. She’ll kick me a
gain when she catches me, I expect, but it’ll be funny. Of course, I’m typing this entry rather than voicing it, she’s now sitting next to me reading, and she’d hear me, obviously. Her back is slightly towards me, and I think ribs can be tickled. Enough diary for now :-)

  Evening

  What a shitty - excuse my French - but what a shitty day. I’d picked up one of the new novelty ties for my dad, the ones where they’ve embedded micro-bubbles in the tie, and you can fill them with liquid and you suck the tip of the tie to get a drink from it. I thought it was amusing, and quite cool new tech too, you can fit almost a quarter of a litre in there before it starts to bloat.

  Anyway, got to the house, and walking through the door I could feel there was a bit of tension between my parents. I didn’t know what, but I just tried to ignore it. My mum made lunch, just some sandwiches, and no sooner had she given me a plate when she rounded on my dad, saying to look at the look on my face, how I could obviously see it was cheap meat not proper chicken (I hadn’t really paid attention or cared, I was too hungry for it to bother me) and how could he put her in that position. And so it all came out, he’d quit his job last week, big row with his boss, and stormed out.

  I winced when I heard. In your 50s with no job right now is not a good place to be. The fight went on for a while, Taima and I just kindof sat there on the sofa feeling uncomfortable and trying to not get involved. Which was hard because, of course, when I got him a tie, and he no longer has a job to wear one at, yeah that wasn’t good. Thankfully my mum still has a job, working at a local betting office, so not the best, but it’s a job and right now, that’s something to be thankful for.

  As soon as it was polite to, we left, which made my mum cry because she felt she’d ruined our trip up, and my dad stormed off to the garage to do something else. The train trip back was quiet, we just sat and read, neither of us felt like talking much. Chocolate from the trolley helped a bit, but a sugar rush never lasts long when you’re feeling down.

  Monday, April 7th 2014

  I told Nigel I’d work from home today, keep Taima company a bit, as she’s had a crappy week. First the abuse, then getting caught up in my parents fighting, I felt I owed her.

  We didn’t really interact much over the day. She was online looking at job sites, trying to find a job within 100 kilometres of here (it was 50 last week), and me writing my article. I think she liked having me round though, and it was good to just have that companionable silence where you don’t need to talk, but you know the other one is there.

  I got the article finished, and I’ll reproduce it here. I won’t bother copying the junk articles into here, but I’ll still import the ones I think are important. Not important in the grand scheme of things, but just, important to me, and they tell the story to you the reader, about here and now.

  Variety really is the spice of life

  Rural Oxfordshire is rightly one of the wonders of the country. Small towns, friendly people where everyone knows everyone, and a community spirit that is often lacking in today’s fast-paced, and difficult world.

  Every morning, the local stores open, and the regulars come in for their morning newspaper, or cup of coffee. They could download the newspaper onto their pads, but many don’t even have them. Because change isn’t always fast around here, and so sometimes we aren’t the early adopters of new technology, or the first to try out foods from around the world at the local supermarket.

  But we should always aim to be a community that is by us all, for us all. Even if we don’t always set the trends, we have to move with some of the times, and that includes understanding that we are part of the wider world, and we can’t always close it out.

  It is reckoned that 90% of the population has lived here for at least two generations, and over half probably can’t count how many generations, they would lose track in the mists of time. But new people do come into our community, and our community welcomes them.

  As long as they are like us, anyway.

  It is to our shame that our community isn’t always as inclusive when it comes to people who are a bit different. Eastern Europeans who have come to England looking for a better life away from the struggling Eurozone countries are treated as scroungers, only good for cleaning floors even though it isn’t unusual for a cleaner to have a degree in engineering, working way below their education level.

  But their lot is more accepted than the small minority that dare to have different coloured skin. These members of our community, and make no mistake, they are part of our community, are ignored on the street, are served their coffee without eye contact, and have to hear endless comments made behind their backs, deliberately just loud enough to hear.

  It is natural. It is natural to be uncomfortable around people who are different. It’s a billion year old part of evolution, we stick with those who are the same as us. It’s what stops Lions and Tigers breeding until there are no more pure Lions or Tigers. It’s what makes prey animals able to make microsecond snap judgements as to whether the movement they see is another of their herd, or a predator.

  But we don’t have predators any more, and we’ve evolved from the life of instinct and fight or flight. It is natural to feel uncomfortable around those that you feel are different, but as an evolved species, it is our duty to ourselves and our race to take the next step. When we feel uncomfortable around someone who may be black, or Chinese, or Polish, stop a moment, and think - ‘This is a human, who has feelings like mine, who has goals and dreams, loves and fears, just like mine.’ Accept and understand your instinctive distrust, and give that other person, from the group of ‘others’ a chance to show you that they too are just like you, and maybe we can all learn from them, as they can learn from us.