I got mugged...

Following a highly entertaining evening at a colleague’s flat-warming do, I decided about 4.30am that to remain any longer would only risk offending people. My manners start to deteriorate after a certain quantity of booze, and my sense of humour becomes infantile at best.

So I meandered into the early morning streets on Sunday 4th September 2005. The idea of immediately cycling the 5 miles home felt wrong, so I took a detour by way of Brighton beach. Perched on a wall outside the Gemini bar I was approached by two guys and a girl. The skinny white kid in a hoodie was after a smoke. I offered my pack and he accidentally took 6 or 7. This I could live with. I give up smoking every day so he was really doing me a favour. His female companion, an insane, amphetamine-fuelled, tiny blond girl, wondered if I had one for her too. I pointed out that her friend now had more than I did, so why not ask him?

When she asked the time I obligingly reached for my mobile (mug? me?) which she snatched from my grasp before I’d even activated the backlight, and scurried 20 yards to a group of several others camped around a bonfire.

Not yet grasping the futility of politely asking a dozen (I’m increasing the number as we go, OK?) hoodlums to return my property, I wearily trudged after her to do just that. The hoodie and his sidekick flanked me as I went, gently prodding me with their fingers – whether to encourage me or to make sure I was real I do not know.

By the bonfire I was in the middle of making a polite reasoned request to ‘crazy chick’ when someone tapped me unduly roughly on the face. As I lay face down on the pebbles examining the new, highly asymmetrical nature of my features and the pleasantly warm squirts of blood coursing down them, I felt what seemed like a dozen pairs of hands going through my pockets. There wasn’t room for all these hands at once so some of them beat me about the head to pass the time until their turn came around.

‘Time to go’, I figured, and crawled off through the crowd. Having dazedly reached ‘a safe distance’ I looked back and, feeling a rush of goodwill, offered them ‘the finger’. Amphetamine Annie considered this to be absolutely the last straw and came running after me to deliver a flurry of drug-dimmed blows amid yells of outrage at my rudeness. Too dazed to enter into a conversation I simply pointed to my gory mess of a face and suggested I’d had enough for now, and continued walking. At some point she must have tired, or maybe spotted something shiny, because the flapping limbs went away.

The rest of the story goes something like: find concerned citizen who calls police, accompany police to scene of crime, recover bike and credit card from idiots who are still there, ambulance, hospital, stitches, home.

So what did they get? An ancient Nokia mobile of the kind that most people now use as paperweights, approximately £1 in small change and a lottery ticket (which I now believe to be the winning ticket of course). I read in the papers that E’s are now selling for as little as 50p, so maybe they’ll be able to trade my mobile for one. Quite a haul.

What did I get? The best black eye of my life (fun for scaring passers-by and starting conversations in pubs), six stitches and a fractured orbital medial wall (what we doctors in fact call a ‘face bone’). My revenge plan is simple: Let them continue living their tiny miserable lives while I get on with more interesting things. Revenge is sweet!