I am on a bus. It is very late. I have a handleless wood file which I drum on my head in time with the tapping of my foot. The seat beside me is vacant and, although the bus is quite full, I am only aware of one other person, an old Chinese woman who sits directly behind me. I gaze out of the window at the late-night restaurants, and hope I am in time to catch one open, but my watch reveals that it is past one o’clock, so I am already too late. We pass some which appear to be open, and I feel a strong urge to get off but I suppress it until we are far past. I decide to get off before my stop as it is quicker to walk from here. The road ahead is dark and dead and, as I proceed, I am uncertain that this is actually the right way after all, but I can always work out where I am when I get to the end. I can see lights up ahead now, so I decide to cycle as it will be much quicker. I sense movement far behind me and hear a child calling out in the distance, ‘Daddy, Daddy’. I cycle on regardless, towards the lights, but as the child gets nearer I realise in horror that he is calling to me. I pedal frantically in an attempt to escape but the harder I do so the cruder my bike becomes until, finally, I must pick it up and run. The child is almost upon me now so I give up flight and turn to face him. He is pushing a huge, black thing on stone wheels, it is hideously medieval. ‘Mummy wants to make some changes to you’ he intones solemnly. I scream in panic and hurl my bicycle at him, by now nothing but a flimsy piece of cardboard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am on a bus. It is very late. I have a handleless wood file which I drum on my head in time with the tapping of my foot. The seat beside me is vacant and, although the bus is quite full, I am only aware of one other person, an old Chinese woman who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":569,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.naughtynathan.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}