Because I know you’ve all been beside yourselves with worry and sitting on the edge of your seats waiting to hear the end of my "held at branch-point" saga from the weekend, it’s OK, you can stand down the vigil, I’m still alive. My teen assailant didn’t follow me back to the house and beat the crap out of me with his branch, or anything, I just got totally bogged down with work again. But anyway…
Before I go any further here, I have to first of all eat my words on the whole "the police totally don’t care if I DIE!" thing. Ahem. The police did indeed turn up on Sunday night to take my statement, and very nice the young man was too. He reassured me that no, I was not wasting police time, and that yes, teenagers are very scary, aren’t they, and, why, that young son of a gun? REALLY COULD HAVE KILLED ME. He also said that in the future I should make free with the phoning of the police any time I see gangs of teenagers in the area – get this – EVEN IF THEY’RE NOT DOING ANYTHING. Yes! We have a result, people! Needless to say, my fingers have barely been off the phone buttons since… Nah, actually, I jest. The thing is, you see, I haven’t been back to the ghetto yet. Nope, I’ve been walking Rubin in another, slightly less-ghetto part of town, and I’ve been taking Terry with me, because to be completely honest, I’d rather not be threatened by psycho teenagers every time I set foot out of doors, thanks very much.
Speaking of the psycho teenager, the nice policeman told me there is next to no chance of them finding him, and this is mostly because of my total inability to accurately describe people, places or distances. Especially distances. Seriously, if someone says to me, "drive for 100 metres down this road" I will probably drive forever because I have absolutely no conception of what 100 metres (or whatever the distance in question is) might look like. None. It’s strange because I know what one metre looks like – it’s exactly the same length as those metre sticks we used to use in primary school, funnily enough. I just can’t for the life of me imagine what 100 of them laid out in a line would be like. No imagination? No spatial awareness? Just plain crazy? Yup, that’s me alright.
I’m also not so hot with guessing people’s ages and heights. Put 5 people in front of me and ask me to guess what age they all are and I can guarantee I will get every single one of them wrong. That’s why I hate it when people do that "What age do you think I am?" thing sometimes. (WHY DO PEOPLE DO THAT?) I know I could be at least 20 years out – on either side – so seriously, folks, never ask me that. And I’m really, really bad with children’s ages, mostly because almost everything involving children is a complete mystery to me. When asked to approximate the age of a child (and weirdly enough, this seems to happen to me quite a lot) I can only do so by making reference to my niece and nephews, whose ages I know.
Now, in this case, I knew that "taller than George but not as tall as Michael" probably wouldn’t have been much use to the policeman (and would also have been completely wrong given that I wasn’t actually wearing my contact lenses at the time of the incident, so the "teenager" could have been 43-year-old woman for all I know, or even a visitor from another planet), so I had to settle for my usual answer to these kind of questions, which is "Ummm… I’m not sure." So our conversation went a bit like this:
Nice Policeman: How far away was the person when you first seen him?
Me: Ummm… I’m not sure.
NP: And what height was he?
Me: Ummm… I’m not sure. Tall? Or maybe… short?
NP: I see. What age would you say he was, roughly?
Me: Ummm….
And so it went on. They will obviously never find him, but at least I’ve done my civic duty, and have been given carte blanche to phone the police anytime I feel like it, which will probably be a LOT.
Other than that, the rest of the week has been pretty boring. I did manage to buy a new summer skirt for £9 in the children’s section at Asda (age 10-11, people. You can see how this screws with my ability to guess people’s ages, can’t you?) but no way was it as exciting as being almost-but-not-quite attacked in the woods, so actually, nothing exciting has happened this week, and really, I don’t know why I’m even writing this.
As you were.
p.s Rubin’s (heavily embellished) take on Sunday’s events are here…
