21 Jan 22 – Fast Walker
Hi Everyone,
This week I scared someone on a dark lane.
I didn’t mean to, it’s not a hobby of mine. So I apologise to the innocent teenager who was the victim. Sorry, innocent teenager and sorry about the years of therapy ahead.
Here’s what happened.
I enjoy a good walk, and now that we’ve got Norman I walk a lot around the town. I pride myself on being a fast walker, when I say ‘pride myself’, I don’t mean I put it on my CV or anything, although it has been useful over the years, especially that Foster’s Lager Market Researcher job.
This wasn’t in the training, but for other Market Researchers out there, never approach a guy carrying a hefty-looking club with nails sticking out of it (you’re welcome).
Because I walk fast (boasting again) I have an issue with slow walkers. When walking with my daughter I usually prepare by filling my shoes with broken glass and taking a baseball bat to both my ankles but I still get complaints.
So I’m walking back home with Norman, it’s about 5 and getting dark. I see a teenage girl up ahead, anyone under 30 looks like a teenage girl to me nowadays, even the boys. She was walking unbelievably slowly, so slowly in fact that I was forced to call David Attenborough’s Green Planet time-lapse photography team and borrow some equipment to verify there was actual movement.
I couldn’t physically walk that slowly. I took two forward and three back, I pretended I was walking in wet cement or I was Neil Armstrong on the moon
But I was still gaining on her at a remarkable pace.
This is a major issue for men I think. How to overtake a woman in the dark?
Do you just hang back and creepily follow at a very slow pace? I would normally cross over, whizz passed (because did I mention what an incredibly fast walker I am) and cross back, but we’d just turned onto a narrow lane with a pavement on one side and a bit of grass on the other.
I saw her head move and didn’t know whether she’d seen me or not, which stressed me even more. Norman looked at me
Sweet Jesus, a tortoise zoomed passed me and I thought ‘I need to get home some time before the end of the universe’, so I’m going for it.
I went into full-speed mode.
Sorry, Usain, it’s all in the jeans.
When I was about to pass, I said to the teenager
‘Sorry, I’m just…erm…’
I have a thing that I never finish sentences when it’s very important that I do so. In this case, the end of the sentence could’ve been anything:
‘Sorry, I’m just…erm…attacking you’
But it was meant to be:
‘Sorry, I’m just…erm… passing you because I need to get home before the end of the universe’
Either way, it didn’t matter, she had her headphones in and didn’t hear anything I said. As I went passed her shoulder I smiled in a way that was supposed to convey ‘I’m harmless and have daughters of my own, so don’t worry.’
She screamed.
The last time I heard a scream like that, my daughter was plummeting to earth on ‘The Tower of Terror’
That load of scribble can no way convey the terror of the sound.
It was at that moment that Norman did what he said he was going to do. I was warned. And the tower of terror bounced back up and went again.
‘Sorry sorry sorry…’ x 300.
This was a lose-lose, leave or be arrested, situation. I apologised another three hundred times and I moved on swiftly.
So I’m apologising one more time. If you’re a subscriber and live just down the road from me and your daughter came home traumatised on Tuesday, I’m VERY sorry.
But let’s end on a positive, I got home before the universe ended, so phew.
That’s it once again.
Not sure I said earlier, but I’m a super-fast walker, and the other day, when I was walking into town, some idiot came passed me.
I wasn’t concentrating. It was a lapse in concentration – I’d had a sausage roll earlier and pastry always slows me down.
It would’ve been really childish to pick up the pace and whizz right passed him, which I could’ve easily done, absolutely no problem whatsoever, but I crossed the street instead, wasting valuable seconds, and stepped on the gas from that side.
He knew I was onto him because he must’ve increased the pace a little himself. Look how stupid he looks trying to walk fast…
But it was nothing I couldn’t handle, obviously. I leapfrogged a couple of bins and pushed an old woman in front of a double-decker bus, but the main thing is I wasn’t out of breath and I would’ve overtaken him if it wasn’t for the Post Office and the Skwiggles prints I was taking there.
So it was your fault.
Have a great weekend. And very very sorry about blaming you there, I don’t know what came over me. Love you, and lots of other general sucking up.
Take care and all the best,Ian