A little tale to highlight what we're talking about here with regards to these dangerous times.
We visited the beautiful Jurassic Coast this week, staying in a lovely cottage in a quiet, but reasonably isolated village about half a mile from Chesil Beach.
We arrived on Monday afternoon and checked into our self contained cottage.
There's a lovely gourmet pub in the village, but unfortunately, presumably as we're in November, it was closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Being around 5 miles from Weymouth we looked up a Chinese restaurant that our Cottage welcome pack had recommended and booked a table.
Well....from the moment we parked the car in a dimly lit car park we felt like we were in the middle of a zombie apocalypse!
Everyone seemed as though they wanted to attack us.
My senses were on red alert walking the streets till we found the Chinese.
This had 4 tables, none laid out and 1 person taking orders for takeaways and manning the kitchen.
A complete **** hole. He announced on our arrival that it was "cash only", which gave us our chance to make our excuses and run.
We placed an order at the Domino's next door, but had to wait 20 minutes.
We decided to take a stroll along the sea front, thinking it may be a bit more friendly. This was equally as alarming.
Dodgy characters everywhere and at only 7pm.
I was convinced we'd be mugged for our food on the nerve jangling walk back to the car.
I suppose this is just a reflection of modern towns at night, but it felt as though we could easily have become victims, no matter how much we were on red alert.