The One Where I Shoot an Asian Woman in the Face With an Uzi

So, I’m standing in a field and it’s looking a little familiar. It’s not long before I realise that it is in fact Pinehill playing field in Hitchin, where I used to spend many summer days playing football, cricket (and other sports I was no good at) during the school holidays and weekends when I was a kid.

I’m with someone, although I can’t make out who it is. We’re chatting about something, probably thermo-nuclear physics or Jordan’s breasts. Anyway, the conversation is cut short when a missile appears out of nowhere and lands in the field, about 100 metres away from us, and explodes. My friend has seen enough and plain-old disappears. I wonder to myself what the immediate threat is, as whoever fired the missile is obviously a crap shot – if they’re aiming for me that is. My theory swiftly comes back to bite me in the arse as my unseen enemy then sends over about half-a-dozen missiles, obviously going for the blanket-bombing, law-of-averages approach. They rain down, a lot closer than is comfortable and I decide to leave, post-haste. However, unsurprisingly, I’m a little slower than the missiles and one explodes so close to me that I’m blown into the air, clearing the tops of the trees that line the edge of the field. From my hastily arranged viewpoint, I can see my old primary school, William Ransom JMI, the school playing fields and the railway line that runs alongside them.

Then I start falling, although I don’t experience that falling sensation that you normally get in ‘falling’ dreams – where you jolt yourself awake just before you hit the ground (unless you’re in a Gary Larson cartoon) – and I land really quite gently behind the trees, in a shallow trench that runs parallel with them. I run, bent double to keep out of sight, along this trench until I meet a group of people huddled together, sheltering from the air-attack. One of them, an Asian lady, although I couldn’t be country specific, is making a God-awful noise, wailing at the kind of pitch that would give Mariah Carey a run for her trucks full of money. I quickly ascertain that this wailing would clearly give away our position to the enemy and that she has to be silenced.

Then, although I have no idea how it got there, I suddenly have an Uzi in my hand. Alarmingly, I have no hesitation in pointing it directly at her face, holding it about a foot away from her nose. After a couple of seconds of hoping she’ll get the point, she doesn’t and I open fire, peppering here contorted, wailing face with round after round of rapidly-delivered ammunition. After a few seconds of this, I’m informed by one of the other people huddling in the trench, that shooting her in the face won’t help. They’ve apparently tried that already, together with, bizarrely, stuffing her mouth full of cakes…which didn’t work either.

Then I wake up.

OK, Pinehill playing fields – from my childhood and all that, so I get that.

Missiles? Open warfare in Hitchin? Uzis and attempted murder? – Sometimes you’ve just got to admit that you’ve got no idea…and this is one of those times.