Picture, if you will, 2003. I'm living in England, 'up north' as they say in local parlance, and I work in a shitty factory which offers decent wages if you're up at Fuck O'Clock in the morning to meet the demands of later, more indolent bastards that meet a day fully formed when they at last need to venture, blinking unsteadily, into a world made to coddle them by your careful hand.
It's 3am. It's winter. I'm fucking freezing. I'm not far out of Sheffield and it's tits o'clock early. No stars. No moon. Just me, the darkness, and the cold. I trudge to the bus stop because I'll be fucked if I try to tackle the usual walk to work with my CD player in my pocket and St. Anger squalling helpfully with what violence 4xAA batteries can manage.
I step into a bus shelter. A small, helpless thing in the dark. There I see a shape. It's small. It feels smaller in the moment. I look, and recognize that there's more tail to this thing than a cat would usually muster; this isn't an ordinary encounter with the urban wildlife. I squint and it comes into focus. A fox. An actual, honest-to-goodness, I come from a land where foxes don't exist fox. Right there in front of me. What the fuck do I do?
I say to it, as though addressing a colleague, "G'morning, fox." And to nobody's great surprise it looks up at me as though I've just pissed myself and shoots out of the bus shelter like a fart in a hurricane. But in that moment - in that split second - for the very first time in my life, I've seen a fox. There. Right there. Up close. Sharing the same space as me. It's real and it happened... and fuck, I hope it wasn't too cold to go running away from me like a maniac.
I guess I’ll accept second place, because there’s no way I’m beating that!