FIGHT
Written by James Ward
Last night I went to the pub to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It was a pleasant evening. There was cake. We talked about the possibility that perhaps some (not all, but some, maybe even just one or two) of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust deserved to die. They can’t all have been saints, can they? I also spent too long talking in too much detail about Falco to a man who had indicated a very slight interest in the subject on the basis that his mother used to own Falco 3.
After the pub closed, we were walking along Oxford Street when a man punched the girl I was with in the face on the fictitious grounds that she spat at him. Obviously, she didn’t spit at him, but even if she did that’s no excuse to punch a girl in the face. No, the correct response to being spat at in the street is to spit back. If he was any kind of gentleman, and genuinely believed he’d been spat at, he should have spat in her face. That’s what Nigel Havers would have done.
Instead, he punched her. This irked me somewhat and I shouted at him (something along the lines of “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?” although I can’t remember my exact words). At that point, he attempted to kick me (or perhaps did kick me) and maybe even threw a punch at me before walking off. Perhaps unwisely, I followed him. As he continued trying to kick and punch me and I continued trying to stop him from kicking and punching me, I decided to call the police. It’s quite exciting calling the police, I’ve only done it a couple of times before, but it’s quite a thrill. It’s the actual police! Off of the telly!
Understandably, the man didn’t really want me to call the police and so grabbed my phone out of my hand and hurled it at a brick wall. He continued walking on and I continued following him, now even more annoyed because he’d just smashed my uninsured phone. For some reason, during our argument, as I explained the reasons why I was annoyed (“YOU PUNCHED A GIRL IN THE FACE YOU FUCKING PRICK. YOU SMASHED MY FUCKING PHONE”) he offered me his phone as a clever joke. His phone, you see, was a very old pay-as-you-go handset with no credit. The joke was on him though as I explained you don’t need any credit to call 999 and I was going to call the police again with his own phone. Cheg on.
Realising that I was right, he grabbed his own phone out of my hands and pushed me over a chain-link fence and ran off through Bedford Square. I chased after him, shouting at him. I think the things I shouted at him this time were designed to anger him so he would stop running away and come back to try to hit me again at which point, in the absurd plan forming in my deranged mind, I would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until the police arrived. I shouted things like “YOU ARE A PATHETIC MAN WHO PUNCHES GIRLS BECAUSE YOU HAVE A TINY UNUSED PENIS AND NO-ONE LOVES YOU”. This didn’t work, and as he was getting away, I pathetically shouted “I HOPE YOU DIE IN A PIT OF GRAVEL”. I’m not sure what that even means. I think I’d meant to just shout “I hope you die”, but I phrased it wrong and the sentence continued without me knowing what to say next. The “in a pit” bit was good, but still the sentence carried on, until finally coming to rest with the unsatisfactory “gravel” pit choice. As a parting shot, the last word the man heard me shout was “gravel”. Why gravel? I have no idea.
I went back to Oxford Street just as a police car arrived and we got in and had a drive around looking for the pathetic man with his tiny unused penis but we couldn’t find him. I think we actually drove the wrong way, but I was too confused to really know what was happening by that point. Then the policemen took our details. We established that the two phone calls from different mobiles were both from me. I guess there’s a slim chance that if he ever topped up his phone with a credit or debit card, he could be traced from that, but I doubt it.
I asked if it would be possible to see the CCTV footage of the incident at any point, but the policeman said that if the guy ever got arrested, my testimony would be called into question because I would be basing it on the footage I had watched and apparently testimony based on video evidence is worse than testimony based on the fallible human memory. I think really I wanted to see the CCTV so I could convince myself that what I had done was in some way brave, rather than idiotic and that I’d looked kind of cool grappling with this pathetic man with his tiny unused penis. I didn’t grapple with his tiny unused penis, but now I really regret not kicking him in the knackers. Why didn’t I think of that at the time?
After all that, the policemen offered to drive us to London Bridge station, which was nice of them. In case anyone from the Metropolitan Police is reading this, the policemen definitely didn’t put the sirens on just for our entertainment and they definitely didn’t ask us not to tell anyone because they’d get sacked if anyone found out. That didn’t happen. As we got to London Bridge, one of the policemen pointed out the London Dungeon to his colleague and told him they can get in free. “Did you just say you get in free to the London Dungeon?” I asked.
“Free travel on London Underground too” he replied.
“Wow, free travel, free tickets to the London Dungeon plus you get to drive around in a police car every day, what a brilliant job” I said.
“Yeah, but if anything bad happens, you have to get involved and sort it out and sometimes you get punched in the face.”
“I suppose,” I replied. “It’s not all glamour.”
I have bruises and no phone.
JAMES WARD: I LIKE BORING THINGS 
I was hoping you’d tell this story after I read your tweet. You tell it with a great deal of humour but it must have been fucking awful at the time and I for one think you’re very brave. I’m not sure I would have been as brave, although I would probably have shouted out something a bit more hard hitting than ‘I hope you die in a pit of gravel’.
Hope your friend’s OK.
You, sir, are a hero.
God, you are incredibly brave. Good on you. It’s amazing the stuff that tumbles out of your mouth when the adrenalin’s flowing, isn’t it?
Gracious me! Sometimes shit things happen to lovely people, and i am glad you are ok. I am glad there is somone to write about these events, i hope in 300 years someone will read your account and wonder what kind of idiots used to inhabit Greater London / The UK. I hope your friend’s face is ok too, becuase after the mention of her being punched in it, the story kind of focussed on phones and gravel, we are left wondering whether the protagonist’s companion was seriously injured or whether she too joined the chase for the ‘perp’. I bet, after all that, she wished she HAD spat at him. Next time a swift kick in the nadgers should do it. Lxx
I have a feeling you can request a copy of the CCTV footage under the data protection act.
Christ, there are some real pockets of humanity out there. Is she OK?
A friend of mine was mugged and robbed of £200 – and her entire handbag – in Kingly Street behind Libertys, one lunchtime. She stood in the street screaming abuse at the person who’d robbed her being quite slight and sober enough not to want to get ina fight with a man who’d just robbed her.
A police car screeched to a halt next to her, two policemen got out, put their hats on – and bravely arrested her for a suspected breach of the peace.
Not all of the Met audition as extras for the “sympathetic copper” roles in The Bill.
I hope you and your friend are ok, I do hope the tiny penised man his has “mum” saved in his phoned so the police can phone her and tell her how proud she should be.
On another note, I once drove a fast response ambulance in the name of charity. My paramedic co-pilot spent all the time on the track telling me to go faster and try all the different sirens and giggling about how much he loved his job. It’s amazing how much fun being allowed to play with sirens is!
Poor James. Just know that we all love you and wish this beastly thing had never happened to you.
What a c*nt. Imagine the irony, one day, when he lies there in a pit of gravel slowly dying staring down at his unused penis.
In his seminal work “Rough London” Elgar Stint argues violent night-time encounters are both unexpected and unpleasant. He develops his “Theory of The Punch”, a radical re-imagining of interpersonal conflict which portrays hitting, kicking and scuffling with strangers as unwelcome intrusions into the narrative of one’s personhood. Stint suggests that rather than friendly, affectionate emotions this kind of “Hit Encounter” can provoke fear and rage, dislocating the normative euthymia of our regular existence into a dark “other world” of pain and sadness.
I am so very sorry for your friend and for you. Interestingly, the one time I was punched in the face was on suspicion of having spat on a boy in my sixth grade glass. I was walking back to my desk when he turned me around and hauled off with as much force as he could muster. In a room full of witnesses no one came to my defense with the justifiable passion that you showed. He learned he could get a day off of school for his infraction and I learned that being punched in the face was not to be taken so seriously by others. Whatever the wisdom or success of your actions, I prefer the lessons of your response. She is lucky to have you as a friend.
i posted a link to this on my facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
you evidently didnt act quickly enough nor would i have, its such a stunning event, and the way it then unraveled
i’m sort of interesting what the girl made of all ot that.???
Fantastic piece!
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story then please get yourself onto the Twitter and support the ‘new telephone for James’ appeal at #wardethon. Thank you.
This reminds of how unreliable the Police really are. They should have called in a sniffer dog or a helicopter to look for the man. Of course if you had of had a gun you could have shot him and stole his phone.
Hello! Yes, I am okay. Thank you for your concern. x