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December 21, 2001

I could have done with

I could have done with a rangefinding stapler last night, certainly. In a pub in Northwood, Middlesex (average house price - GBP200K, typical indigenous resident - pretentious middle income with unruly kids) I was watching my local football team being eviscerated in the Cup quarter final. As the second (or was it third?) goal rifled in, a random woman, ugly almost to deformity I might add, pointed at me and started laughing. I proceeded to do something you never actually expect yourself to do (right up there with carrying on running after you go over the edge of a cliff a la Wile-E-Coyote, or winking at an imaginary camera/audience) - I looked behind me, over my left shoulder, in a really exaggerated fashion.

Discovering that there really wasn't anyone else there, I inaugurated a polite dialogue with the female (species undetermined), calling into question her powers of identification and suggesting a more appropriate course of action. That is, I said "Who the f*** do you think I am? You don't know me. F*** off." At which point her "boy"friend (quite extraordinary that two of these semi-sentient lifeforms should somehow have dredged up the initiative to discover each other. God forbid they procreate and produce a whole litter of abominations sharing their genes, although like as not nature would ensure the majority of these malformed abhorrences do not survive their infancy) starts asking me whether I want him to come over to where I am. As I felt unprepared for an even closer look at him, and even less inclined to take in the halitosis and BO that no doubt accompanied his cosmetic unpleasantness, I strenuously endeavoured to decline his invitation.

So in the end, I didn't get in a fight. If I'd had a Muji stapler, however, I could have taken all comers. The relevance of all this gibberish is quite simply - that although I'm an aggro little sod much of the time I didn't encounter any "trouble" the entire time I was in Japan. None. God knows I put myself in the way of a couple of potential serious beatings (not least karaokeing Bohemian Rhapsody and Candle in the Wind in a Kyushu bar full of drunken salarymen and youths only trying to enjoy themselves, pestering yakuza while they were collecting the rackets from a pachinko parlour, openly and brazenly eating in the street etc) but never was there the sniff of a ruck. Nor, indeed, was I fleeced, conned, pickpocketed, attacked, knifed, lightened, raped, stabbed, racketeered, mugged or buggered at any point during my time in fair Nippon, despite spending a good portion of it wandering around it slack jawed and aimless, like an asylum escapee. No language skills, plenty of ready cash and saleable documents, all my worldly goods in an easily made-off-with container, identification almost certainly limited to "one of those yellow chappies". I may as well have been adorned with Perfect Prospective Victim in nine foot tall flashing lights - though in itself that might make the most hardened criminal just a trifle suspicious, I suppose.

So. No crime. No fighting. No trouble. I don't know how Chris can stand it.

Posted by dan at December 21, 2001 12:21 AM | Permalink

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