Brought to you by the letter...run for your lives!!!!

In the resonant words of the Lizard King, strange days have found us. As HST said so eloquently, we are now living in the Kingdom of Fear, where capital T truths are as rare as lips on a chicken and nothing, nothing, is as it seems.

Not even a decade ago, an envelope left absentmindedly on a park bench or a bus, was still just an envelope. But now, dear friends, it is a letter bomb. And a few days ago, I was a hair's breadth away from being snuffed out by one of the suckers.

But I'm too wiley for that. And whichever degenerate son-of-a-bitch set up the ambush severely underestimated me.

It was just after 8am when I got on the bus and took a seat about half-way down the aisle on the driver's side. Being one of the first stops on the run, the bus was as good as empty with only me and a couple of others on board. I had my iPod playing some smooth beats while I fished my copy of Kerouac's On the Road out from my equally snazzy man-bag to round out my image of the suave and eminently casual commuter.

And I was just opening my book to the right place when I saw something strange out of the corner of my left eye. I looked down on the floor, across the aisle, a couple of seats ahead and noticed an envelope. I wouldn't have given it so much as a second thought had it just been a flat, garden variety, letter. The kind that can easily slip your custody, when you're on your way to the nearest post box. But this little fucker wasn't flat. It was slightly raised. And that meant I had some decisions to make.

My first reaction was to think about reporting the strange package to the driver. No big deal. "Hey driver, I think someone lost an envelope back there. You might wanna sort it out."

Nah. That could be embarrassing. Even if I did it casually and didn't cause a scene, the others would think I'd been spooked by a silly little envelope, even if my intentions were just to help some poor bastard find some potentially important property.

And it didn't take long to realize how thoroughly ridiculous it was to think for more than even a moment that a perfectly innocent letter strewn on the floor was actually a sheath for a dangerous explosive. Don't be a twat. Go back to reading your book.

Next Stop. A chubby Greek boy gets on and sits in the seat where the envelope is.

Hmmm. If it was a bomb, which it's not, the Greek boy would absorb most of the impact from where he's sitting. I should be safe here. Cruel, I know, but this is the kingdom of Fear and the only rules are there are no rules. These days, picking a seat on a bus is like buying a lottery ticket and this poor fucker just bought a dud.

Hang on, hang on. Why should the Greek kid have to die to protect you? What did he ever do to anyone?

"Well, for all I know, he could be a callous little prick. Probably shot his sister in the leg with an air rifle and burned ants with a magnifying glass when he was a boy."

I go back to reading my book but it's no good. Who am I kidding? I'm not safe here? If that baby blows, I'll be rained on by glass and steel shards, even with my Hellenic buffer in position.

I move back a couple of seat's on the driver's side but I'm only there a few seconds before I get nervous and move again. This time I choose a seat on the opposite side of the aisle, and very near the back where the seats are raised.

Not only is it a good seat in relation to the epicenter of the explosion, I'm pretty well protected by a sheet of perspex. And as the trip progresses and the load swells, there are plenty more human barriers to help ease my worried mind.

Miraculously, the trip ends without any bloodshed. To make doubly sure, I tune into the 9am news bulletin at work to see if any buses have exploded in the past five minutes. Apparently none.

Having cheated death I feel triumphant until a sickening thought occurs to me.

What if the thing had gone off and the authorities went to the security tapes for clues and "well, well, well, what do we have here? Some shifty little fucker, looking as worried as a lobster near a pot of boiling water, and oh, what's this? he's moved seats and moved again. He's proper fucked now."

"Should we send him a letter sarge?"

"Yeah, care of Guantanamo Bay."