I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she’d just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.

She hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn’t believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.

Thank goodness for our security services is all I can say. Once the forces of Law and Order arrived it was the work of a few minutes to explain that I am the product of a family which arrived on this island with the Conquest a millennium ago, that many of my ancestors suffered discrimination at the hands of what has now become the blue rinse brigade, and that in recent centuries our humiliation has festered and hardened into a violent prejudice which all those of Norman descent are liable to inflict from time to time upon hapless British pensioners.

It didn’t help, I added, as if further explanation was necessary, that I hadn’t slept particularly well the night before and that the Jubilee line had been closed that morning, forcing me to stand in line at the crowded bus-stop where the pesky ex-woman had also been waiting.

“All in all, sir,” the nice young constable said, as he folded away his notebook, “it seems to me that your actions were an inevitable product of your heritage and events both in the distant and recent past.

“While I’m afraid we cannot arrest the old woman in question for provoking you, she being dead, you are of course entitled to compensation which you can claim online through the Government Gateway. And I would take the day off, sir, you’ve had a nasty shock.”