At least he didn't drop it far

Walking to work this morning I witnessed a small anti-social act, somebody ripping the cellophane cover from a packet of fags and tossing it to the pavement. I suppose pocketing it would have delayed their ripping open the packet itself to get their precious nicotine hit.

Usually I just tut and don’t reprimand the litterer, this is because I know that from psychopaths are more likely to litter than normal folk and I hate being knifed first thing in the morning.

On this occasion though there was absolutely no way I was going to confront the fellow.

This was because he was a dwarf on a mobility chariot.

I did briefly think of saying ‘smoking stunts your growth’ but was worried that his battery might be freshly charged and he would run me down, like Ben Hur, but shorter.

God alone knows why he needed a mobility chariot although with legs that size it must be faster than walking and I have no problem with him smoking, but why litter? Does he not realise that if everyone did that, the stuff would pile up in drifts. Okay for me, but by the time it was up to my thighs he’d need a snorkel.

I think what really put me off remonstrating, apart of course from a paralysing fear of any sort of confrontation, was that there was just no way it was going to end well. Nobody but me had witnessed the litter and folk on their way to work in the morning walk quickly and heads down, so what they would have been presented with was, no doubt, an altercation where a bloke was shouting at a disabled dwarf. There is no way I am coming out of that well.

In fact for the remainder of the walk to the office my rebel brain and sadist imagination ganged up on me. This is the same imagination, by the way, that steadfastly refuses to come up with the plot of a novel that will depose Dan Brown from the top of the bestseller charts and have me acknowledged as the Jane Austin of my generation (or should that be Dickens…which one wrote about bonnets?) Anyway the most likely scenario, according to my brain (which, truth be told has not had a track record of reliability in this sort of thing, especially during my twenties where, despite all the evidence of previous weeks and months, it kept convincing me that that girl over there would dance with me if asked and not result in yet another bout of humiliation) would be me and the bloke rolling in the gutter, my hands round his neck, his teeth clamped on my ear while a selection of collegues who happened to be passing watched aghast as they saw me trying to kill a dwarf, something that is usually the preserve of ringwraiths.