Reading Roars!

Is Reading getting rougher? I have noticed a recent rise in bad behaviour on our town’s streets.

A few weeks ago, returning from work, I saw a girl very aggressively pulling another girl’s hair in public. The victim was pleading with the assailant to let go. Several minutes passed until a guy came rushing over to intervene.

The day before yesterday, I witnessed a lad strike his girlfriend (presumably) in the face during an argument, again in public. Yesterday, while kayaking through the Oracle Riverside a couple of lads gobbed at us from the bridge, missing me but getting someone else in the group. Idiotic, moronic, bored, pathetic losers.

All this is pretty vile behaviour. And, of course, members of the public stood by and did nothing. Understandably so, as the perpetrators could have been concealing knives or other weapons.

What I find worrying is the absence of police officers on the streets. Where are they? They seem to be an invisible force these days. Of course, you see plenty of them about on Saturday night, when squads of chavs come out to play, but during the daytime they are missing.

Reading is becoming a less civilised place, and it makes me sad. Either that or I’m getting old.

I’ve often said that Reading has extraordinary sunsets. I don’t know why this is. Maybe the local Met Office can give me an answer?

I took the dramatic picture seen here with my humble cameraphone. The sky with red cloud looked like a blood-splattered surgical gown. The silhouetted tower is, of course, the local town hall (but does it not look like the Charles Bridge tower in Prague?).

Find a nice spot with a loved one, perhaps by the river, or the Walkabout terrace and, during those minutes of crimson glory, Reading is an undeniably romantic place.

It’s gone 11pm and, not for the first time recently, a noisy helicopter is flying overhead, no doubt irritating a huge swathe of the Reading population.

The noise pollution spewed by the aircraft is ridiculous. Who or what can they be looking for?

Of course, it’s not just Reading affected by this nocturnal nuisance. John Hind of The Observer wrote that the London Assembly’s Environment Committee

has collected written evidence from 160 people, which is equivalent to 0.5 per cent of the people woken by just one police helicopter hovering to track the progress of one hooded 14-year-old.

These helicopters need muffling - and fast.

News of another Reading Festival comes from across the pond. The Reading Festival and Book Fair was held at Palmetto Historical Park, Florida, on Saturday 5 August.

So did the US festival resemble our own, with crowd surfing in the mosh pit (a practice invented by Peter Gabriel, apparently, who also created the more genteel WOMAD), beer flying through the air and stolen sleeping bags?

Well, no. One activity is described by the Bradenton Herald as follows:

Young children outside the cottage proudly glued ribbon, wiggle eyes and pom-poms to dog biscuits to creatively make their own dog biscuit magnet.

Ok, if you hadn’t figured it out already (and it took me half an hour, but then it is a Bank Holiday Monday), this Reading Festival was actually a reading festival. The dog biscuit magnets remain a mystery.