My Saturday was fairly well planned-out: I was going to go food shopping in the morning, do a bit of writing in the afternoon, and then make Alex Stupak’s cheeseburger tacos in the evening. Maybe add in a test run of a raspberry parfait for a dinner I’m doing next weekend.

That lasted until around just before one. And I’m in the bathroom. Not something I’d talk about on a normal day, obviously.

Gunshots

Now, I live in a city in America. I have heard gunshots before. Sometimes they’re actually fireworks, sometimes a car back-firing, and sometimes they really are gunshots. A distance away. But this was different.

Outside the window

Outside the window

Somebody is emptying a pistol outside my window and all I can think about is that dying on the toilet would be incredibly embarrassing.

Look, I’m a simple boy from the South of Britain. I’ve never had to really deal with this sort of thing. Back home, guns exist, obviously (it’s ten years this week since the Met shot Jean Charles de Menezes, after all), but they’re mostly other. Something that you are very unlikely to come across in everyday life, and specifically, you don’t often encounter the situation where you are wondering about the bullet-stopping abilities of a wooden house’s walls¹.

The police arrived around 30 minutes later and possibly walked around the area trying to find bullets. I wouldn’t really know, as at this point I had retreated to my dining room, thinking that it provided several walls of protection from the side of the road where the shots where fired.²

I might³ have been suffering from a slight touch of shock at this point.

The idea of spending all afternoon in the house suddenly seemed a lot less appealing, so I drove to Target to get tortillas for the cheeseburger tacos (I’d forgotten them in Kroger this morning). Except, I drove past Target, went into Atomic Empire, and then spent forty minutes wandering around the shop before leaving with Mercury Heat #1 and…Resistance: Avalon. Retail as therapy. Always works.

I forgot to actually stop in Target on the way back, so I still don’t have tortillas. Which is something of a problem for making tacos…