h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you travel on the top deck of a double decker bus then you too would have noticed an amazing phenomenon, on every bus shelter roof is a solitary shoe, never a pair just the one and on occasions it maybe accompanied by a traffic cone.

And a brick.

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Here in Manchester, bus shelters start off as being made out of toughened security glass.

There is a strange phenomena, which happens nocturnally, where something which was a solid and vertical pane of glass measuring three feet wide by seven tall dissappears overnight and becomes a heap of little glassy fragments of surprisingly uniform size.

You might think, from the occasional clue left behind, such as a footprint on an intact sheet of glass, that the Boot Fairies had visited during the night!

Boot Fairies are supernatural entities to whom any intact sheet of glass in a bus shelter is an affront to their sense of self and machismo. Therefore, they will menace the glass with repeated blows from the feet until it becomes a heap of pebbly little bits.

The only way of propritiating the Urban Boot Fairy appears to be by removing all sign of the hated glass and replacing it with large ugly non-transparent sheets of corrugated metal, which will then be left alone.

Manchester is dotted with shrines to the Urban Boot Fairy and more and more appear every morning.

Suggested methods of exorcism include baseball bats, machine guns, and accidentally, whoops, installing non-safety glass in an attempt to get the creatures to slice their own legs off. (The act of kicking out a glass panel in a bus shelter is known as "St Chav's Dance")

But as a phenomena, it seems the ugly small-minded sprite will be with us for some time yet!