All Nightmare Long

<< The Winstanley Estate: Average length of time between muggings - 21 seconds

I learnt on Saturday, courtesy of some frantic last minute searching, that women are on average more prone to nightmares than men. The worst nightmare I ever had was that I got suspended for doing something I'd been told to do, forced to take a month off work, given a harsh punishment, and then spent a whole week several months later waiting to see if my new employers are going to find out and call off the whole deal. Oh no, wait a minute, that's my actual life - worse than a nightmare.

Another individual seen living a real-life nightmare this week was Brian Kuh, a guy who pretty much organised a Donkey Kong world-record attempt, only to see a guy who wasn't even that into computer games obliterate his score. That's right, this was The King of Kong, which saw Steve Wiebe, a regular John with a solid practice ethic, pitched against Billy Mitchell, the previous record holder, hot sauce merchant and pretty much the strangest man alive. I won't spoil it for you - suffice to say it's like Federer v Nadal with bent umpires and nobody else watching. Incidentally, the name Donkey Kong was intended to translate as 'stubborn ape' by its Japanese creator. Damn you, Babelfish...

Another group of people having a week from hell were the hotshot bankers at Lehman Brothers, America's fourth-largest bank until it collapsed in frankly unfathomable circumstances. It was a tragic sight watching honest, hard-working investors schlepping out of the head office with their worldly possessions esconced in boxes, when just months previously, they had been having fights with piles of ordinary people's money, before building forts from said money and lighting cigars inside with $1000 bills, cackling deliriously throughout the whole experience. Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys.

This nightmare theme is getting a bit thin now, but I can't conclude this theme until I've expounded on my (possible) future workplace - I went and had a look the other day, and found that it sits snugly on the edge of Battersea's Winstanley Estate - an area that did indeed resemble the waking nightmare of a drug-addled 1960s town planner. Feeling slightly uneasy about my new environs, I decided to look it up on Google. Here's a tip - never look anything up on Google; it paints the area as a sort of Thunderdome for South London - drug dealers literally selling lorryloads of crack in front of police stations, then building forts out of said crack and cackling deliriously etc. I'm sure it has a reputation, but I have a feeling that these articles were written by people who consider any town without a Waitrose to be ghettoised beyond repair. The most troubling news about Winstanley is that So Solid Crew used to live there - believe me, I've been waking up sweating every night since I heard.