Random belligerence

When I lived in a basement flat with french windows that opened out onto a paved garden of interstitial weeds (coblions, dandicocks and sticky peter) I would sleep sound through summer nights with the top window open.

Until one night, when the dark had closed in as much as it could over the sodium bowls of glare from streetlamps placed in ranks from this street to another.

That night I heard a scrape on the transom in the wood and glass of the window above the doors.

Some hunched drug burglar was trying to scrape face into my rented place.

Now, I am not small, not unstudied in the practical arts of shouting and, with spittle, making out I am nastier than I am.

So I shouted something, bleared up out of bed and careered to the door.

The fucker burglar twat collapsed off the window, and I chased him down the road.

Which would have been justifiable, except I sleep naked.

So I chased this teenage burglar for about half a mile before I realised that a naked man chasing a teenager at 4 in the morning may need special explaining.