A creepy day

There is a frightful deranged individual who stands most nights on our street corner, raving to the world like a maddened preacher at a revival or a political extremist on Hyde Park Corner. He seems to be tireless, carrying on for hours. He rants about his perceived injustices with remarkable venom. His bitterness and bigotry are all encompassing – pan-ethnic and including every sexual persuasion. He begins when darkness falls, and is often still going at three in the morning. When I get home from work at midnight, he is there to greet me – but fortunately he seems to ignore me as I try to creep inconspicuously into the house. Then, like now, I can hear him raving from my bed. He looks a bit like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and the Uni-bomber – tall, thin, bearded- and totally creepy. I can’t imagine why he has selected our corner. It is neither busy nor really deserted, even late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. There is usually someone about, hurrying past him, pretending not to notice the unignorable. But there certainly is not a sufficient number to constitute an audience. His main audience is Rachael and I, and we are quite unenthusiastic about what he has to say. I wanted to take his picture to show you, but Rachael refused to cooperate. I thought we could go for a midnight walk and she could feign talking on her phone and could surreptitiously take his picture, just like she does of people on the bus. But she wouldn’t! So I took a picture from inside my house. It looks rather like one of those convenience store robbery videos – the ones about which the newspaper ask, “can you identify the culprit from this bunch of grey blobs?”