The obscure delights of Coventry

They never cease to amaze me. When I arrived here, I assumed that the most loathsome part of my journey to and from campus each day would be verbal, physical and psychic assaults from 'the locals'. How wrong I was: the supposedly yobbish youngsters loitering in the street provide such pleasure that I now look forward to being accosted.
Last night, for example, when walking past a group of robust-looking teenage girls, one of them broke into a Ministry of Silly Walks silly walk. What an unexpected joy. And there was nary a cuss to be heard, nor a dilated pupil to be seen.

And this was not the first time. A few months ago, a boy sidled up to me on his BMX while I was cycling home. In his best cheeky chappie voice he said: "Nice bike - wanna swop?" Now I must insist that my - racing - bike is utterly unsuited to any sort of BMX scallywaggery; he spoke in a sincere but silly tone, as though he thought that I might turn down his offer(!) Yet his remark can only be made sense of as deeply, deeply ironic: what on earth would he do with a bicycle like mine?

Last year, while walking home, I passed a family (an obese mother surrounded by raucous children of various ages) moving ('walking' is not the right word to describe this amorphous chaotic mass) in the same direction as me. As I overtook them, one of the kids asked of me: "Dude, are you the Matrix?"
Oh how I laughed - where do they come up with this stuff? And why do they make the students at my university seem so boring?