“Terrorism” is a word our campus doesn’t like to think about. This is a place where 18-year-olds come to feel free, not to get their Fun Snaps bangers confiscated.
The T word was first aired during the 2012 Olympics, when the team we were hosting turned up for a safety briefing with the security manager, who’d booked himself on annual leave.
Taking his place at an hour’s notice, I straightened my clip-on tie and entered the boardroom. Someone slid me a copy of the document I was meant to be presenting: “Highlites of Bomb Procedure”. I looked down and there was the script from Black Hawk Down twisted into a mind-bending flow chart. I looked across the table at two non-native English speakers in tracksuits.
“You see anything strange,” I said in my loudest Brit-abroad voice, “you come to us. Anything strange, any time. Security office.” I pointed vaguely in its direction.
“If we see something strange, or need you to evacuate, we come to you. We say: ‘group photo - everyone into car park’.” I maintained eye contact, intent on keeping their gaze away from my boss’s diagram, which he’d livened up with dynamite clipart, and a bubble labelled “improved ambience”.
The reality is there is no agreed response to a terrorist attack on campus. There is also little chance of establishing one when you have academic secretaries who get pissed off with students banging on their windows, and so stick the building entry code to the inside of the glass.
Determined to make his mark, our boss did once designate the wheelie bin store as a potential fallout shelter in case of nuclear attack; this was not well received. One guard told him: “If I hear the four-minute warning, I’m grabbing the nearest member of staff I can and giving them one – and that includes you.”
It’s hard to take terrorism seriously when one day we’re briefed about Project Argus – a three-hour counter-threat lecture that we’re required to attend – and the next are told they’re cutting funds to the campus police community support officers.
The majority of our brushes with terror are digital. We once received bomb threats in Spanish signed by “Bradley”; when they’d finally been forwarded to the right inbox and translated, the bombs were already meant to have exploded.
The only terrorist we’re sure about has got eight legs and eats flies. Sammy the spider has to date triggered 100-plus burglar alarms, constantly building his web in front of our PIR sensors. If that isn’t “the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”, I don’t know what is.
One afternoon, the campus chaplain quietly told us he’d seen “a young man talking Russian and acting suspiciously”. Security guard Snowy – Cornish, ex-squaddy – took off at a sprint, like he’d been given orders to shoulder-charge the Kremlin.
I followed him and found a Serbian exchange student off his nut on mephedrone, and yodelling topless out of his bedroom window. Once we managed to pull him in, he broke into a mad Hopak dance: arms crossed, knees going up and down like West Ham. Snowy returned fire with a Cornish country jig.
The two were soon arm in arm. Prevent in action.
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