A Pipe Bomb and a Rainbow

Monday mornings are a hateful time of the week, mostly because I am not yet recovered from the weekend--and nobody else that I work with appears to be either. We make it as productive as possible, however. We make tea first thing when we get into the shop, and we complain quite productively about how Monday-ish we feel and how it can't possibly be Monday and that the thought of it being Monday the next day completely ruined Sunday for us all. Then we move on to how none of us are yet fully awake and how the weather is absolutely despicably dreadfully wet (surprise!) and the traffic was horrendous like you would not believe (because if it rains, nobody here can drive very fast, which I frankly do not believe because the weather is wet 99% of the time). And we moan and sip tea and blink at the neon lights of the shop, and it is all tremendously productive simply because it solidifies our comeraderie and puts us in a good enough mood to begin the week.

At 11am this Monday morning, a police officer walked into our shop. I wasn't there. I was gathering the essentials for mid-morning tea (not to be confused with early-morning tea), juggling and clutching them in my two hands: a newspaper, three sausage rolls, a pint of milk, an apple, the various change for the various people in work who'd wanted these things and sent me out to get them for them. When I got back, miraculously not dropping anything, my manager was almost bouncing up and down. 'There's a bomb scare! We have to put the shutter down! We get to take an extended break without customers interrupting us! Isn't it exciting?!' Well, yes, it was, until we realised an hour later that the army, who had been called in according to procedure, had forgotten to evacuate us. Except for the butcher who 'had too much work to do' and therefore couldn't be bothered with bomb scares, we were the only people on the block. Not to worry, it was only a pipe bomb, and it was across the road in a construction site where they were renovating a building that houses pedophiles. There was a protest about the house's proximity to the children's home only last month. Apparently, somebody had taken protesting to a new level.

Peering through the closed shutter of our shop, we saw the bomb squad arrive in two trucks.

The police closed the road off and actually (unbelievably) stood at the back of their police vehicle and drank their tea out of very white mugs while they chatted with passers-by, probably about the situation.

One of the trucks drove down to the house to check out the bomb while the other remained with the two robotic bomb detectors, pictured underneath camouflage tarps. They were really cool, and so was the guy in the bomb suit, so constricted by the weight and fit of the black outfit that he could hardly walk.

I had a headache by the end of the day, staring through that shutter. Yes, we all got a good length of uninterrupted time for our mid-morning tea, but without interruptions the day dragged by far too slowly. It was a good three hours before all the trucks and gear drove off back up the road. They never once used the robotic detectors, so we knew it wasn't anything big--or we may have been stuck in the pharmacy for the entire day or longer and had to get rescued! We didn't find out until later that it was only us and the butcher that didn't evacuate, and it certainly was not intentional on our part--but we did get a nice close-up on all the action!

Wednesday started with a rainbow.