Be The Jam

Date 2nd May

Stage Planning Expedition

Location Oxford

Weather Lovely sunny day.

 Health Good

Fitness Poor (resting heart rate around 60 BPM)

Advertising revenue Today - £0.00.5

• Total  £3.68.5

Readership Steady

Prospect of Mission Improbable happening Good - winners never quit and quitters never win, or so they say.

Today's "genius" idea Writing reviews for cash money

What would you do if you where woken in the middle of the night by someone walking through your bedroom? It happened to me last night, well I was already awake and whoever it was didn't walk through my room so much as fall over something not so very far from where I was trying to sleep in the middle of the night. I was not impressed. My first thought as always when I hear people in the woods at night was that they must obviously be a bad sort and up to no good. It is a fairly reasonable assumption, to my mind at least, that anyone who is walking about in the woods at that time of night (my good self accepted of course) must be at the least poaching and at best a homicidal maniac out searching for me. Whoever they are and whatever they are up to the last thing I want is to be caught of guard, lying encased in a sleeping bag is pretty much off guard. I decided that the best thing to do would be to quickly get up, put some trousers on and go hide in some shadows, taking my biggest knife with me just in case, until I figured out who what why was abroad. My reasoning being that my shelter, rucksack, sleeping bag and tesco's bag glowing white in the moonlight were bound to attract attention so if I were elsewhere it would give me the opportunity to assess the stanger before deciding whether to engage the chap in small talk. His stumblings where getting closer and I blindly felt around for my jeans, to no avail. This cast a new light on things, the idea of engaging in a knife fight with a homicidal maniac in the middle of the night is one thing, doing so without trousers is quite another. My fight or flight options chose flight, but where? My legs haven't seen sunlight in oh - so long, they would reflect the moon's light and give away my position as surely as if I had lit a torch. Closer still came the stumblings "perhaps it's Mike come back from Scotland" I thought to my self and resolved to stab him anyway if it was just for putting the wind up me. I almost shinned naked up the tree I was sleeping under but at the last moment remembered all those films I have seen, I have learnt from television you see; it doesn't matter who you are or who you are running from if you decide to run away by climbing up something eventually you run out of up and have to confront your pursuer. In the end I decided to do the sensible thing, I pulled the sleeping bag over my head and willed whoever it was not to find me, they didn't. They passed by about ten meters from me, all was still, no owls hooted, no creatures rustled in the undergrowth, just the sound of someone walking noisily through the woods.

Now my curiosity was risen. Who was it? A poacher? A ne-er do well. A drunk? A bank robber looking to hide bags full of loot somewhere where if only I went to watch I could retrieve it, or some lost walker scared and alone? I'm afraid it was the idea of potential wealth rather than the idea that I could help a fellow human being find their way back to civilisation that inspired me to get up and follow the sound of the slowly diminishing footsteps, pausing only to grab my knife I set quietly off, my bare feet making hardly a noise. Then I stopped myself, whoever they were, hero, villain, innocent, they were very unlikely to take kindly to being followed through the woods in the middle of the night by a naked man with a knife.