What my kid thinks

what my kid thinks

My daughter has been getting pretty angry about the whole riot thing, and said she wanted to tell people what she thought, because she’s been reading about her neighbourhood in the press. So, I said she should try and get her ideas down on paper.

Having read my previous post, she also asked me to justify why we are living here rather than somewhere cleaner, “safer”, with less unpleasant people and behaviour. Let’s not get into that here, but I think it forms some context for her comments below:

The Tesco Riot

We are a small neighbourhood and I like our independent shops. Me myself I was not happy with Tesco for deciding to build where they did.

I think that the reactions to Tesco when everyone heard about it were good. Small peaceful protests. I live around the Stokes Croft area and I believe that it was all fine.

But a group of squatters thought it would be fine to squat where the Tesco was going to be. When Tesco got round to wanting to build the the local store some protesters started acting in a way that I don’t think was suitable: Glueing themselves to the building with superglue and concreting themselves into barrels full of concrete. The police took action and I think dealt with it well, although it did stir the neighbourhood and things got worse. For me, I already had anger of the people that did the out of order stuff. I really didn’t like the unthoughtful reactions.

Then when I was starting to feel better and my anger had gone out of my system the Tesco opened and on Thursday the 21st at around 10pm I couldn’t get to sleep because of a loud helicopter sound. I decided to go upstairs and ask my mum what was happening. She was there staring out of the window, so I went to join her.

The next morning I asked my parents what was happening. Turns out my Dad had been there for about 5 hours just watching the scene unfold. I also happened to be walking down the Stokes Croft way on Good Friday. What I saw was horrible. So careless.

The next day I read an article about the night and it pointed out that someone threw a concrete block onto the police! That is what really annoyed me the most! One person did that yet over everything else that annoys me the most. So careless and unthoughtful.

Maybe people should have thought before they did anything.

11 yrs of age