Perhaps one is more valid than the other...

Call me old Mrs Unadventourous but, before tonight, two experiences on the list of many I have not had would have included having a bottle thrown at me from a moving car and hearing "fuck you, you fucking slut" shouted at me from a completely different car. Clearly I have led a sheltered, middle class life because tonight I experienced both.

Oh sure leaving Burswood on my lonesome to catch a taxi 'on the walk home' was among the less brainy schemes I've hatched over the years. Actually it was doubly stupid because I was tarted up for the media ball and tottering on heels at the time but when has anyone ever made a brilliant move when free booze all night was involved?

So the increasingly dark road pretty quickly became very, very creepy and it did occur to me (thanks for asking) that I may well die and be buried in a shallow grave in the uber dodgy-looking park/oval I discovered on my travels. Concern over my inability to recognise my surroundings (I was, as it turned out, walking the wrong way- I know, I know) also grew pretty sharply, heightened by the complete failure of any of the many taxis I saw to stop for me. But until some cockhead hurled a bottle from the window of their car (which managed to smash on the footpath right in front of me, covering my lovely new silky dress in the process and scaring ten types of shit out of me) I was holding it together pretty well.

Me being me (read: drunk, emotional and sort of a pussy), as soon as said cockhead let fly I pretty much burst into tears. Luxuriant, embarassing mess-up-your-face-tears. Tragically, however, I was not distraught enough not to give the finger, moments later, to the dicksnap who beeped at me. The result? A "fuck you, you fucking slut" screamed out the window as the car sped away. Je-sus. Is this really what we've come to?

It was right about then I decided it was time to call in a lift, which only necessitated another ten minutes of waiting in the middle of fucking nowhere at the continent's creepiest intersection (presumably marking the entrance to hell) for the lovely Ruth (to whom I owe many things) to arrive. I was wearing a skimpy-by-my-standards dress with a huge wet patch on it, tottering in high heels, still sort of bawling and trying not to look like a distraught hooker. I can't remember the last time I have actually been quite so frightened, nor felt so helplesss. It was all a bit fucked actually.

At the risk of angering my two male readers I would suggest that men can't imagine quite what it feels like to be alone and stranded in the wee hours on a Saturday night in a slinky dress when all those episodes of Prime Suspect come back to terrify you. I mean nobody enjoys being uncomfortable on the street waiting for a taxi instead of tucked up in bed but it is, I'm a little bit sorry to say, Different For Girls.

Of course boys, too, can have bottles thrown at them, just as they can be brutally raped and murdered in the middle of the night but I've yet to see a boy huddled in the darkness trying to cover his cleavage with a pathetically small clutch bag and dreading each new set of headlights coming along the road just as I've yet to see a boy get called a fucking slut from the safety of a speeding car.

The lesson of the night? It's a tie between 'Don't Go Off On Your Own You Dumb Bitch' and 'People Are Fucked'. Both valid points, I feel.