Today I did something very unusual – by my standards, anyway.

I went to the maul this afternoon to pick something up from the bookshop. I was in a hurry, so I ran up the escalators and slipped between two guys who were in the way. Unfortunately, the cable from my headphones caught on a button on one guy’s coat. The button popped off, and I heard it and stopped. I picked the button up, apologising, but the owner (who hadn’t made any move to pick it up himself) started swearing at me, going on and on about how I’d f*king broken his f*king button in a nasally voice.

Everyone knows how threatening it is when a complete stranger starts swearing at you in public like that, and I’m an easily intimidated person – normally in a situation like that, I go scurrying off and hide somewhere. But this time I did the exact opposite of that: I stayed right where I was, facing a man who was probably twice as strong as myself and clearly more aggressive, and gave him a telling off. I told him there was no need to be rude, and when he whined back that of course there was, because I’d f*king broken his f*king button, I said “it’ll take two minutes to sew it back on again; stop being so melodramatic!”. And off I went.

Why lie? I’m proud of myself. Jerks like that deserve to be given a dressing-down, and if it comes from a short, completely unintimidating woman, all the better. It’s occurred to me that maybe I did what I did because of the whiny voice he was using; I did, after all, spend six years working in childcare.