Night Rider

Tonight, for perhaps the very first time, I managed to deliver that cutting retort which usually comes to mind five minutes after the moment has passed. You know the one I mean. We’ve all been there, that anguishing moment when your languishing mind finally catches up with the embarrassing scene that’s just played out before it. That moment when it pieces together such a wonderful, eloquent response that it would cut your opponent to the quick and leave you free to walk away, head held high. Instead your arthritic gray matter actually only stumbles into action when you are long gone from the situation and shamefully licking your wounds, silently wishing your mind were as sharp as your tongue.

Well, tonight dear reader, I did it. As I rode through the glistening streets of Soho with the unseasonably cool breeze in my hair and neon lights in my eyes, I had the audacity to (legally) cycle past a queue of stationary traffic and position my clattering, old, mock heritage bike in the green bike box in front of a red traffic light. Naturally, the evolutionarily challenged man in control of the little black bus at the front of the queue was disgruntled that he was not able to hurtle off through amber lights because, me, a little blonde girl on a bike, had blocked his route. In an amazing feat of dexterity not usually witnessed in this particular variety of graffitied Neanderthal, he located his horn and mouth at the same time and began to spout some monosyllabic cusses as he drove his car alongside my deliberately slow moving bike; “fuck you, you fucking fucktard, you’re fucking in my fucking way”, or something so like that it doesn’t really make much difference. “I’m sorry”, I said, “did you say ‘Fuck. You?’” and then l left a gap while another verbal diatribe of unimaginative swear words spluttered from his etch-a-sketched and foliaged mouth. And before I even realised what was happening I heard a distinctly familiar noise eminate from my own mouth, calmer and more punctuated than I normal I said; “I don’t think you will be fucking me, or anyone remotely like me for that matter, as you dear sir, are consigned to fucking what dregs of humanity you can intoxicate enough to open their legs for you. And judging by that glorious display, I’m pretty sure that’ll only be your mother, and that was just to get you out of her”.

And with that he drove off, briefly throwing up his middle finger for my inspection as he swerved out of sight. And so, as the winds of autumn blow in, it seems a change in me has blown in too, for now my tongue seems to have finally engaged its rapid response unit.