The sun had got his hat on - but not for long

For months we’d been cooped up in stale offices, shops and stores, air conditioning units rattling themselves apart with all the dust and infection circulating through them, the air hanging dank and spore-filled over our heads.

For too long we’d been trapped on the inside, wiping the scum from our lips, particles of other people’s skin from our brows, trying to shake off the custardy fug of endlessly recycled air from our brains.

Our throats bulged with the pus of bacteria, as we hacked up our lungs and gasped for some fresh air.

We were starting to stew.

We’d grown so pale you could see the blood pumping like treacle down our arms and struggling back up again.

People’s eyes narrowed as they began slowly morphing into moles.

Then, out of nowhere, we saw our old friend returning.

They’d been away so long, but now they were back. And they had their hat on.

We didn’t recognise him at first, sitting low and orange above the horizon.

Was Watford about to have a burning ball of fire and rock blow it to high heaven?

Were we about to star in our own Russian-style-filmed-from-a-dashboard meteor attack movie?

Was it time to call Bruce Willis to nuke this baby?

No. It was, of course, the sun – back from his holidays.

Like many others, when the work whistle blew it was straight to the park – out to find a bit of greenery, catch some rays, remember what the outdoors felt like.

I wasn’t alone – Waterfields Recreation Ground was thronged.

Children galloped around, jumping and leaping like fawns on the first day of spring.

Anglers headed out with their rods and scoured the river.

On Radlett Road playing fields, teenagers indulged in their favourite after-school activity of resuscitation re-enactment snogging, slurping down each others’ tongues like thirsty dogs. Disgusting.

Joggers ran around (as they are wont to do), a granny trained on the outdoor exercise machine, others just sat and stared skyward, soaking up the rays like lazy lizards.

Perhaps I was high on all the vitamin D suddenly pulsing round my system, but it all seemed so beautiful. Just like that Small Faces song.

The trees turned their leaves to their big yellow life-force, birds swooped and tumbled in the breeze, bushes rustled with rodents.

And everyone had a smile on their face.

As a species we’re naturally outdoorsy types.

We should be pacing the plains, foraging in the forest, swimming in rivers and munching berries (also, throwing spears at defenceless animals before tearing them apart to eat and licking the backs of toads for pre-historic psychedelic fun-times, but we’ll ignore that for now).

Put an intelligent animal in a cage and they’ll end up pacing around, trapped in an endless cycle of frustration, slowly losing their minds. It’s just not natural.

Chain a human behind a desk or shop counter for all their waking life and they’re likely to do the same.

It’s time to cast off the shackles, launch that monitor through the wall and crawl out of the hole.

Blast off the doors and head outside as if your life depended on it.

And then, with the inevitability of billions of years, the sun set again.

And hasn’t been seen since.

It wasn’t me. Honest guv. I've been looking over my shoulder most of this week, half expecting to be flung up against a wall by a mob of angry police officers. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Earlier this week a gentlemen matching my description smashed the back windows of two police cars, took a jerry can full of flammable liquid, emptied its contents and set the two vehicles alight.

Police are looking for a tall, thin and white male.

I’m all those things. He was wearing a blue Puffa jacket. Not disimilar to the one I own. He was wearing black trousers, black footwear and gloves. JUST LIKE MINE.

Whichever way you look at it – such an attack is a bold statement. And the fact that it happened outside Abbots Langley Police Station gives it even greater volume.

A point to prove? A grudge to bear?

Or just senseless destruction with some vague political point?

A couple of years ago, in a town I shan’t shame by naming, I heard a commotion in the stairwell of the flat I was living in.

Opening the door for a nose, I was faced with two police officers who barged in, held me up against a wall and screamed in my face: “Where’s the gun? Where’s the gun?”

One of them started searching the flat, going through drawers and turning the bed over while the other had me pinned.

It conspired that a neighbour, one window along, had been firing a BB gun at pedestrians on the street below. They’d got the wrong flat. They didn’t apologise though. Or tidy up.

At that time I seemed to be constantly getting stopped by the police.

Often they’d pull me over with the excuse my brake light was broken, poke around my car and grill me. It never was broken.

It’s easy to get mad at the police. Some seem transformed by the uniform.

Drunk on power, it can sometimes feel like they’re abusing it. Some of them undoubtedly do.

The police force has a history littered with injustice, corruption, racism and fabricated evidence.

But not all of them are so bad.

Most are struggling to do their jobs amid swathing cuts and dwindling resources.

They joined to make the country a safer place, to catch the bad guys and protect the good ones.

We might not like the way they go about it always, but arson ain’t the answer.

So do you believe me now? Honest guv, it weren’t me.