Contents
- Editor’s note
- Father opens ‘tricky’ day care room door
- Bottle-throwing assailant shatters, ‘repairs’ window: A broken window, a stolen glazier truck and terrible repairs
- Reporter romps, 30-4, resoundingly defeats himself: On simultaneously winning and losing a record-setting baseball game
- Bowled over: The brief life of a suction-cupped bowl
- The mystery of the mysterious jar of freeze-dried decaf coffee (fiction)
Editor’s note
Welcome to The London Report’s second proper ‘issue’. As with Issue One, this is a compilation of the posts from last week, 8-14 May. They’re approximately arranged in the running order of a classic weekly news magazine, and a much greater reliance on hastily drawn sketches than Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker ever were.
Still, I hope you enjoy the issue. Thank you for reading.
Father opens ‘tricky’ day care room door
LONDON — The father of an eighteen-month-old baby was temporarily trapped in a toddlers’ play room today. No matter how hard the man struggled with the handle of the room’s door in the Hackney day care centre, it refused to allow him a graceful exit.
For some thirty seconds, the man pulled the handle up, pushed it down, let go of it, gently pushed it up then down, and switched from using his left to his right hand, then rattled it back and forth — with consistently frustrating results.
‘The man didn’t realise for a long time that there was a safety lock beside the door,’ said Beth, a care worker at the day care centre. ‘Sometimes I forget it’s there but it’s there on the wall beside the handle. I’ve never seen an adult have so much trouble opening it.’
After exiting, the father explained his trouble with the door — decorated with colourful letters, jaunty numbers and principles carers follow when teaching babies and toddlers — as ‘part of the learning process’. He also pointed out that he had walked through doors for more than thirty years without incidents such as this.
Bottle-throwing assailant shatters, ‘repairs’ window [UPDATED]
LONDON — Early Sunday morning, an assailant hurled a beer bottle at the first-floor window of a reporter’s East London flat. The bottle-thrower is expected to return to the scene to atone for his destruction.
‘He’s probably making plans to fix the glass or he’s creating a gift to express his sorrow and embarrassment about shattering the window then running away,’ the reporter said.
Through a spokesperson, the assailant confirmed that the as-yet-unidentified assailant had thrown a green-glassed Grolsch beer bottle at approximately 6.00am on Sunday and was ‘terribly sorry’. The assailant remained coy about plans for atonement.
Glass dismissed
The assailant threw the green-glass bottle of Grolsch beer at approximately 6.00am.
After a running start, the assailant hurled the bottle with an arm-motion similar to a bowler in a cricket match. According to the assailant’s spokeswoman, instead of directing a cricket ball towards a ground-level batter, the assailant imagined a batsman floating one story above the ground, guarding the pane of glass that represented a wicket.
‘He also imagined that the ball was actually a half-full beer bottle’, the spokeswoman said.
The bottle shattered the exterior sheet of the double-paned window, causing shards of glass to fall to the patio and pavement.
Upon impact, the assailant and his friend fled the scene.
Threw the drinking glass
The reporter’s wife watched the bottle through the flat’s other, unbroken first-floor window.
‘I saw the little [assailant] throw the bottle,’ said the reporter’s wife. ‘I tend to look out the window in the morning. I saw the [assailant] and his friend walking outside just a few minutes before they threw the bottle. They were talking loudly about something I couldn’t hear. They were carrying beer bottles and looked drunk.’
The reporter’s wife speculated that the assailant and his mate were approximately twenty-five years old, and that they’d travelled to Shoreditch for the night from a suburb or town not far from London. She imagined that they’d stayed too late at a club, missed the last train home, and decided to kill time walking around East London while waiting for the train station to open on Sunday morning.
‘They walked by our flat a second time at about 6.00 and that’s when the [assailant] threw the bottle,’ the reporter’s wife said. ‘It just shattered against the window.’
Glass-tastrophe avoided
‘When it hit, I thought, “That could’ve hit my [eighteen-month-old] son!”’ the reporter’s wife said. ‘Had the bottle not broken when it hit the glass, it would have continued on and landed in a place right where he loves to play.’
As soon as she saw the assailant throw the bottle, the reporter’s wife’s said her ‘mother’s instinct’ kicked in, compelling her to chase the young man and his friend as they fled.
‘I wasn’t going to fight them or anything,’ the reporter’s wife said. ‘I just wanted them to know that they could’ve hurt a baby.’
A real glass act
At approximately 11.30pm on Monday night — the day after the bottle-throwing incident — a handful of young men, about the age of the assailant, were milling about outside the reporter’s flat, discussing recent election results. It was a particularly foggy night.
When asked about busting a window with a beer bottle then running away, a young man said, ‘I’d never do something like that. Even after a few drinks I wouldn’t destroy a pane of someone’s double-paned window.’
‘Especially if there’s a baby in the house,’ said another young man.
A few feet away, a young man who looked to be the assailant appeared on the reporter’s patio. He dropped a handful of white roses, a light-up ball and a press release.
Glass announcement
An edited version of the press release follows:
I’m going to do what’s right… . I’m going to personally repair their window. I’m also going to give an explanation for why I ran away like a scared little baby. It’s actually a really funny story, but the main thing is that I had to go because I’d pledged to do loads of volunteer work for three different non-profit organisations… . I just want the occupants to know how truly, truly sorry I am to have broken their window and for potentially jeopardising the health of their young child. So sorry. I’m going to do something really special to let them know how sorry I am, and that I’m a real, caring member of my community.
[Editor’s note: The following section was added on Wednesday, 11 May 2011.]
(Not quite) glazier-like precision
At approximately 3.30am this morning, a glazier’s truck cut through thick fog as it arrived outside of a reporter’s flat in East London. The blinking hazzard lights were engaged, and the bottle-throwing assailant exited the driver’s side door, followed by waves of dry-ice smoke.
The assailant propped a ladder outside the flat, and hauled a roll of duct tape and a piece of glass — approximately the size of the pane he had broken the previous night — from the truck. He climbed the ladder and taped the window into place in a rough approximation of where it had previously appeared. He wrote a special note on the window, expressing his remorse. He then loaded the ladder on the truck and drove into the foggy night.
‘I’m sorry to have broken your window,’ the assailant wrote. ‘This is probably not the best way to repair a window. But I’m not glazier and I gotta get this truck back to the glazier before they notice I’ve borrowed it.’
That night at approximately 4.15am the tape holding the replacement pane of glass failed, and the glass fell to the front porch, where it shattered.
Reporter romps, 30-4, resoundingly defeats himself
LONDON — In a lopsided baseball game in which the winner was also the loser, today a reporter in East London resoundingly defeated himself. The visiting team (controlled by the reporter) walloped the home squad (also controlled by the reporter), resulting in a record-setting 30-4 score.
‘There is no more fickle game than handheld electronic baseball’, the reporter said. ‘Today, as the visiting team I just wanted it more, gave 110 percent and went all-out to win. As the home team, I just couldn’t get any rallies started and never seemed to get in the zone’.
Playing an antiquated electronic, handheld baseball game that allows just one person to play at a time — the computer handles pitching — alone in his office afforded the reporter the opportunity to tally runs for both the home and visiting squads. Although the reporter had played the game several times since receiving it as a birthday gift in 2010, today he broke two personal, single-game records for the most runs scored by a team, and the greatest margin of victory and defeat.
Reflecting on how he was able to both win and lose the same game, the reporter mused that the game also conjured a second illogical situation.
‘This game was like a dream and not like a dream’, said the reporter. ‘I couldn’t believe I was actually scoring thirty runs! It was like I was playing baseball in some wonderful dream. But never in my craziest dream did I think that scoring thirty runs was something I’d never dreamed of doing. This is a real dream come true’.
The reporter added that he hasn’t actually had any video game-based dreams since he was 14 years old.
‘I tip my cap to the part of me who played the visiting team. That part of me really brought it today’, the reporter said. ‘The other part of me should’ve just gone for a jog.’
Bowled over
LONDON — In late April the parents of an eighteen-month-old toddler purchased a ‘slip-proof’ bowl. The lime green bowl with the suction-cup base seemed like a good idea when purchased from a small shop along Columbia Road.
Unfortunately, the parents washed the suction cup in the dishwasher, which neutralised the cup’s ability to stick to the parents’ kitchen table.
‘Cleaning it in the dishwasher really messed with the chemical makeup of the suction cup’, the father said. In a last ditch effort to restore the suction cup’s holding power, he applied some moisture to the cup’s bottom by licking it before pushing it against the table, where the cup held in place for approximately five seconds.
After assessing the bowl, the parents predicted that the suction-less bowl would wind up on the floor, in a manner similar to those of many of the baby’s other bowls — in a pile, surrounded by a puree or some slightly chunkier food. Today, their prediction proved to be correct after the eighteen-month-old flung the bowl from the table. The bowl cracked upon hitting the kitchen floor.
The mystery of the mysterious jar of freeze-dried decaf coffee
Sometimes fate hits you with a two-by-four to the forehead, and on Monday morning I took a hard hit between the eyes. That was the day I arrived at work and realised that someone or some shadowy organisation had sent me a signal.
It was a typical Monday in many ways — I was the first one at the office, arriving with a cup of coffee — except for the jar of freeze-dried decaf coffee that sat beside my telephone. None of my other colleagues had received the coffee-jar signal. It practically shimmered as it sat on my desk and, when I listened closely, it seemed to emit sounds that sounded approximately like, ‘Follow the clues and you will unlock the secret of London’s future. Drink more coffee! Feel free to share this information with your colleagues and friends! I am cryptic!’
The jar repeated its message in a loop for a good five minutes before I put it in a desk drawer. It’s difficult enough to concentrate in open-plan seating without a squawking coffee jar messing with your thoughts.
I needed some quiet time to think. I knew that someone sent me that coffee jar was a clue. And I knew it would take all of my wits to bring this case home to whomever or whatever secretive person or organisation had set me on the case.
The first thing I did was examine the jar for clues. The jar was almost empty, I noted. But, very significantly, nine crystals of freeze-dried decaf coffee were arranged in a random-seeming pattern at the jar’s bottom.
‘Nine crystals’, I mused. ‘That must mean I need to collect nine crystals from across London or the world, then put them in the jar and set them on my desk. Maybe this is a test of my crystal-finding skills… . But where am I going to find nine crystals?’
Upon reflection, the idea seemed too scattered and expensive for me to pursue. I decided to focus on the more budget-friendly number nine.
‘Number nine, number nine’, I mumbled. I then realised that the coffee jar was pointing me towards The Beatles’ song ‘Revolution 9’, in which the phrase ‘number nine’ is repeated. Plus, The Beatles have a strong London connection. The connections between the crystals, the song, London and my budget were too strong to ignore.
I played the tune but nothing happened. The mystery remained as hard and impenetrable as a frozen stone encased in lead, covered by a sticker that reads ‘Warning: Hard and impenetrable’.
The only thing left for me to do was consider the song’s title. I decided to make nine revolutions. I spun myself around in my chair, which made me dizzy. I staggered to the floor and seemed to feel the Earth’s rotation and its hurtling through space just as my colleague Seamus arrived at work. He asked me if I needed help.
Did I need help? Of course I did. I’d need his and many more people’s assistance to solve the clues. Throw in the dizziness, the thrill and the mystery of a big case and, well, that was too much for just one man to handle.
To be continued … .
