Thing That Go Bump In The Night

Last night I was happily settled into futon, contemplating my early morning train to the North and happily waiting to slip into unconsciousness so the resounding pain in my jaw would cease. I dreamt about the tiny man in the bonjela adverts that lives inside an ulcer. I find this man funny because he's utterly ridiculous and not even the most over active imagination would ever assume there were tiny men with prickly hands living inside mouth ulcers. And this is coming from someone with a firm belief in numskulls and mermaids.

But then I got woken up. Woken up at about 2:45 by someone hammering. Now this, I thought, was a little odd. First I thought, maybe I live above the author of the song 'If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the..." and someone had finally bought them a hammer, and they were following through on their promise. Then I thought, why would anyone pick 13th September as the day to make that person's dream come true? Seems a bit of an odd day. No one does stuff like that on a Monday. So why are the hammering?

Then, the part of my brain that watches too much TV kicked in and I decided that someone downstairs was trying to inneffectually lock up a crack addled Phil Mitchell a la Billy Mitchell in the absurdly melodramatic 'Queen Vic burning down' episode of Eastenders that I caught last night. Then I realised Phil Mitchell doesn't live below me - it's a family who always seem rather pleasant. So I thought maybe that wasn't it.

Was someone locked out and trying to get into the building? Well, we have buzzers...and a sense of social decency so you'd hope that their first approach to trying to get in wasn't waking up the entire building and scaring the living nightlights out of them.

Which really only left me with one option. Some mad guy with a hammer was going to kidnap me, just like Kim Bauer (massive tool) and I was going to have to fight my way out of it like the true heroine that I am. I was ok with this plan. I'm pretty feisty and decided that my plan of action would be to launch the dining room table at the intruder. However, this would have involved getting out of futon and going and crouching behind said dining room table until my would be kidnapper came into the room. And I didn't know how long that was going to take. And it was much more comfortable in my futon.

So, I stayed in my futon. Concocted new plan. Play dead. This always works with bears. And who wants to kidnap that? A borrowed corpse is very difficult to get a ransom on. But then I realised holding my breath tends to give me hiccoughs so I thought I'd struggle to convince anyone brighter than Donna Air that I was dead. Troublesome.

So only one plan remained. To let myself be kidnapped and then to cause havoc once they had me. The sort of havoc that they couldn't possibly keep me kidnapped. I'd be upsetting paint pots and kicking people and singing non stop and generally being a nuisance. And they'd be furious.

So I settled down to wait. But, they must have gotten wind of all my planning because they never turned up to retrieve me. I'm thinking THAT is entirely down to my projected air of feistiness. Take that hammer man.