Behind the Grassy Knoll

A friend of mine - you know who you are - and I have a terrible running joke. I don't remember exactly how it got started (okay, I do. I'm just not going to say right now) but it involves accusing each other of being the sort of person who sports sunglasses, pulled-low trucker caps, dodgy facial hair, drives vans with the windows painted over, has a mysterious mirthless smile, and hangs around primary schools dispensing free candy.
Paedophiles, namely.
I said it was a terrible joke. It is. It gets worse.

Picture this: I'm on holiday in Australia and Movember is about to finish. So far, boring. But stay with me. My mate and I are comparing pictures of our horrible facial hair via the majick of the interwebs. He has a sparse Tex-mex porno mo. I have a mo-goatee combo that looks like I've glued pubic hair to my face, while suffering from acute Parkinsons.
I tell him he looks like a rapist.
He tells me: "You know you have to get a photo taken outside of a primary school before the month is over."
I'm a sucker for taking people up on stupid dares. Luckily there is a primary school just down the road from where I'm staying. It finished a month ago. I figure, cool, I'll nip down there with a trucker cap and sunnies and snap a pic, all without getting arrested or within miles of any actual kid.
I didn't, though, because I found something even dodgier.
On Saturday I went into Brisbane for a concert. I was a few hours early so I went to Southbank to kill time. I figured I'd have a swim while I was there - Southbank's got this big fake lagoon thing, and it was piping hot.
I get there and the lagoon's shut for repairs. The only area open is the kiddy pool, and it's crowded with around 400 kids. I thought: photo op. There's no way my mate will be able to top this for sheer dodgyness.
I was, excellently, wearing sunglasses and my awful facial hair.
I snapped a picture of myself with my best smirk. Parents moved their children away from me. I don't blame them. Then I moved away, feeling pretty gross.
But it was hot. I think the day topped out at around 32 degrees.I fancied I was getting heatstroke. I wandered around in an agony of indecision for about twenty minutes. Then I said to the lifeguard "Can you take my bag for thirty seconds?" and went for a swim.
Well, not a swim. The pool was about a meter deep, so all I could do was lie down, like a big bath. Within seconds, I'd cleared an area of a good thirty metres square, with parents sensibly dispatching their kids to the far regions of the lagoon. I got out pretty smartly, took my stuff back from the bemused lifeguard, and nipped off to get dry. Did I mention I didn't have a towel? I didn't have a towel. There was a little grassy knoll about twenty metres off to the right, so I went there to dry off and inadvertently discovered Kiddy Fiddler Country.

On the grassy knoll were at least five adult men. Genuinely sinister looking blokes. The one nearest me looked like Ernest Hemingway shortly before his suicide, if Ernest had ever kicked back in black Speedos and litres of fake tan. He was "reading," within eyeshot of the entire kid's lagoon. I would put money on the book being upside down or something. My skin actually crawled. I used my t-shirt to dry off and got the hell out of there.

I sincerely hope the cops have that area well staked out. Happily, I've now shaved, and look part-way respectable. But I have an unbeatable photo to remember Movember by.