This is what I’d do in the event of a zombie apocalypse

The power has just gone off!

And aside from a small and shameful feeling of relief that I’m not going to be able to do the vacuuming after all, what I’m mostly thinking is this is just like my dream, you guys.

Except that it isn’t very much like my dream. In my dream, we were trapped in a chapel with a murdering psychopath (anxiety dreams, remember?) who was snazzily equipped with a special liquid in a water pistol that could gouge your eyes out. I did a lot of escaping through small windows and the like, before I stumbled across the psychopath himself, guarding the entrance in the glass lobby. This part of the building is traditionally covered in a prickly carpet to clean off shoes and scalp the bottoms of unsuspecting children going in for slide tackles (dudes, I have scars). The psychopath was parked on it casually, prickles be damned.

I walked up to the vestibule, Henry under one arm, and looked at him through the glass.

‘I was wondering if you might consider letting us go’, I said, deciding that politeness costs nothing but means everything, etc, and it was worth a go.

He shook his head. I stepped right up to the glass and looked him in the eye from a few inches away. He had misty, pale-blue irises of the sort that always seem to go along with murdering psychopaths. I felt quite matter-of-fact about it all.

‘If you touch my baby’, I said, very distinctly, ‘I will rip off your face.’

And then I walked away, thinking GAME ON, my man. GAME ON.

Who knew I was such a polar bear mother? I seem to recall later escaping, turning the eye-gouging liquid on the psychopath and pushing him over a bridge. I woke up feeling vaguely robbed of the Victoria Cross.

And now the power’s gone out, and who knows what kind of raging mobs might be after my collection of two food storage tins and a bag of stale raisins in a few hours? GAME ON, you guys. The polar bear mother is OUT.

Bears.

Updated to say: the fact that I’m posting this means the power has just come back on. Cancel the shotgun.