Earlier this week I went along to the local Neighbourhood Watch Annual General Meeting. I’ve never been before. I don’t really know why I went this time, but there wasn’t much on telly, and I did. I live in a quiet village. One main road goes right through, end to end, with a few small cul-de-sacs leading from it. I live down one of the cul-de-sacs. The village has a pub, a post-office/corner shop, a village hall and a green.
I arrived at the meeting five minutes before it was due to start. I had no idea how many people go along to this kind of thing and was surprised to find about thirty people inside. A quick look around the village hall confirmed that I was the youngest person there. I’m forty-eight, and I can tell you – I didn’t need to ask anyone their age to work out that everyone else was older than I am.
They were a friendly bunch, full of nods, smiles, tea-stained teeth. The local chairman asked whether there were any new people – as well as me there was one woman – and gave us each a free gift, a personal alarm. Nice.
Then the chairman introduced the local community policeman. Apparently this was a bit of a first. We used to have one come along to the meetings, but this was the first time in about four years. He seemed like a nice enough bloke.
While the community policeman was waffling on, I couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing the same uniform we’re used to seeing policemen wear all the time these days, which included one of those jackets that protects him from knife attacks and that kind of thing. I looked around the hall at all the grey-heads, nodding and smiling and hanging on his every word, and looked again at that jacket. You couldn’t hope for a less threatening event than a meeting with these people, and here was, protected up to the eyeballs.
Tell me: What does that say about the society we live in today?
When I was a kid the police never needed to dress like that, and certainly not for a meeting with a bunch of grey-heads. What on earth did this copper think was going to happen?
Anyway, it turns out that the crime rate in our area has dropped considerably since this time last year, and it wasn’t particularly high then, so there wasn’t much in the way of crime to talk about. The chairman opened up the floor for questions, and the grey-heads sat up straight.
It turns out crime isn’t the real problem around here. The real problem is parking. And speeding. We don’t get any problems with that in my cul-de-sac, but for those living on the main drag, and quite a few of this lot do, parking and speeding are very important issues.
One old boy wanted the policeman to agree that it was okay for him to park on the grass verge because it’s safer then parking half-on, half-off the pavement, and was peeved when he didn’t get the nod. Another old boy spoke at length about speeding in his part of the village. The policeman rolled out statistics demonstrating that, when measured, the average speed through the village (in a 30mph limit) was found to be 33 miles per hour. The grey-heads began to get restless.
Someone else lived by a bend in the road. They’d petitioned the parish council for some time to put up a warning sign about the bend, to warn speeding drivers of the danger, before someone gets killed. Or worse. A sign had been erected, but it was obscured by a tree and another sign.
The chairman, in response to several points made, said that most of these issues were for the parish council to deal with, and not Neighbourhood Watch.
It was around this point that I began to understand why the community policeman was wearing the jacket. You could feel the tension in the air. I half-expected one of the grey-heads to lead a charge on the policeman at any moment, the rest following with their walking sticks, ready to batter him to a pulp.
And so it continued. Blow after blow – verbal of course – from the grey-heads, while I looked on. It wasn’t hard to identify the militant ones. And I had to remind myself, these were the children of the generation that gave Hitler a kicking. Or maybe some of these actually took part, I guess that’s possible.
Suddenly, the meeting was over. The grey-heads relaxed instantly. Back to their smiling, nodding selves. They clapped the chairman, and the policeman, and agreed to turn up again at next year’s AGM.
I might go along myself, too.
The next morning, driving to work, I heard something on the radio about an initiative to give every home in Britain internet access. Apparently, the idea isn’t universally popular. In particular, grey-heads aren’t interested in the internet. I thought this was a shame. If they had internet access, they might find something of interest to take their minds off the speeding and parking problems, something to take them away from their lounge windows.
Of course, there’s a flip-side. Imagine if they all had internet access. Instead of meeting up once a year for a meeting they could organise themselves online, then who knows what might happen. I don’t even want to think about it.
Last night, driving home from work, I couldn’t help noticing – in my rear view mirror – the grey hair over my ear. More now than last year. By next year there might not be much of the original colour left. And as I drove into the village, I swear the car coming towards me was speeding. In fact, I’m sure of it.
