bogwitch

Well that's certainly exciting!

Somehow 'Kyle Minas, aged 19, of Thumpers', is the sort of name and address you just couldn't make up, isn't it?

The council estate roads around here seem to have a few odd names like that.

Oh dear! Glad to hear the victim's probably OK.

(There's nothing quite like regional reporting, is there - 'possession of an offensive weapon, namely a knife' is a line of pure gold.)

I think he needs to pick who he hangs out with better.

(It makes me wish I'd had a stab at journalism) ;D

Well, by your description this doesn't sound like the expected norm for the locals...

You'd have been good at it!

I'm not saying the locals are a lovely bunch, but not a lot happens in this town (except for the place blowing up). I think they export the trouble into Watford on a Friday night.

Nah. I realise now I would have been terrible. The writing wouldn't have been the problem, it's the interviewing and sniffing out stories (if they actually bother to do that for the local paper). I can be such a mouse sometimes - especially when I was younger. Plus I'm not nosy enough.

I think they export the trouble into Watford on a Friday night.

*nods* Wouldn't surprise me; Revs is where it's at...

It's definitely true you could be nosier. I always assumed most journalists got their news from press releases and PR phone calls though, if they weren't investigative - though this may be because my mum's in marketing and used (when she was in pressy stuff) to essentially send out articles to the local press, which then got three words changed and attributed to someone else...

Revs? Where's that? (I haven't been into Watford for a long time). I witnessed a rather bloody punch up outside the town hall once, I tend to avoid the town at the weekend after that.

Am I noticeably un-nosy then? I suspect so.

I got that impression too, certainly of the local press. I think you call them up and they send a photographer round if they can me arsed. I will never forget one frontpage of the Gazette that had a woman's stolen birdbath as the main headline - doubt they tramped around Hemel to find that one. My one journalism interview (for a fishing magazine!) was very much a regurgitate press release thingy. They didn't have any original content at all. Very much like part of my job now, translating accident reports from site language into readable reports, funnily enough.

I think the national press (and especially the TV) are a bit more proactive though.

Vodka Revolutions? It's a bar/club/chain thing that I've only ever been in the bar part of, but there's one in Watford and I think it was meant to be dodgy (we never really did that sort of going out in school; all my friends lived in inconveniently different places). It's probably not cool at all any more.

I don't know about nosy, but you definitely seem like less of a gossip-hound than me, and I think of myself as hardly being desperate. So to me you aren't nosy. :D

You see, you'd have been great!

National press, probably, but that's the sort of thing you can get into by learning how go about it on the job. I assume.

Oh is that the Russian place by the pond that's always empty (well it is in the week when I'm likely to go in it)? When I was 15 it was hanging out in the park or Macdonalds (the shame!), but at 18 or so, I was already hating the music and refusing to go to crap nightclubs (Paradise Lost once and never, ever again)

I often wonder if I just don't ask enough questions and this is why I'm always the last to know anything.

I noted that the report in the free paper was word for word what was on the website. A lot of investigating went on there!

Well, at least no one is dead. That would have been worse.

That depends on how the victim is feeling about it.

Yikes.

Indeed!

::Gasp!:: The dreaded Genovese syndrome rears its ugly head again! Now you must soul-search for minutes or even weeks.

Now steady on! No soul-searching necessary! It wasn't like I ignored painful screams or anything like that.

You have to bear in mind I overlook a park and a footpath between the town centre and several residential areas. It often gets noisy on non-work nights (especially in the summer) with drunk people or just passers-by talking beneath my window, so you have to tune them out or you'll spend your life annoyed or on the phone annoying the police.

This group (and I only assume it was this group that were involved in the incident because they were around at about the right time) were being noisy, but they never sounded angry, agitated or even drunk. In fact the only thing I remember anyone saying was 'when we get home let's have a bacon sandwich', hardly a warning of trouble ahead!

You break my heart.

When we lean out our windows to spy down on drunken skullduggery on our quiet residential street we only get to witness inept streetfights. Here you are with somebody getting stabbed and all they can express is a wish for a bacon sandwich?!

I suspect the desire for bacon was before every kicked off.

Street fights are way more exciting than what usually happens around here as we don't really get any. It's more drunken inconsiderate yelling.

A stabbing, that could've had dire consequences. I hope it all gets sorted out soon.

I suppose we'll know more when the local paper comes out.

Eep!! Knives seem to be carried by far too many people these days. Our college have at least two knife searches each year (with a metal detector arch). It's getting scary. One of our former adult students was killed this year - stabbed through the heart for his phone at 9pm on his way home.

It's all so pointless. This guy's going to have a criminal record now and for what?

That's not good! I'm glad they caught him anyway.

I'm hoping it's an isolated incident!