A MAN openly smoking crack on the London Underground has made the news. It’s already known for its nutters, gangs and perverts, so how should you annoy and horrify passengers in your own inimitable way?
Smoking a hookah
Choose the biggest and most elaborate you can find, then sit puffing away with a smug, meditative look on your face. Even if people aren’t livid about the tobacco smoke, the fire risk and your contraption blocking the walkway, they’ll be grinding their teeth at you being a loathsome hipster twat.
Heating fish in a microwave
Requires a bit of planning as you’ll probably need at least a couple of car batteries to get a few seconds of power out of the smallest microwave, so maybe use a camping stove instead. It doesn’t matter because the important thing is the choice of fish – something fairly pungent like mackerel, or ideally some that’s on the turn. Take plenty so you’ve still got some left for the office.
DIY
Why not? If you’ve got some just-about-portable project like sanding down a wooden chair, use your time on the tube productively. Ignore the impracticality and general stupidity of this and don’t hesitate to complicate the task by balancing an open tin of varnish on a seat precariously or whipping out a battery-powered sander. If anyone asks ‘Do you really need to be doing that?’ they’re just being a smartarse.
Cutting your toenails
Whop out those sweaty feet and have a good hack at your claws. While the physical imposition on others isn’t that great, apart from the odd bit of nail pinging into their lap or coffee, the way you assume you can behave on public transport as if it’s your own home will boil anyone’s piss.
Choral music practise
Buskers going from carriage to carriage emotionally blackmailing you for cash for a few inept bars of No Woman, No Cry, are a nuisance, but they usually look as if their lives are shit so you can cut them some slack. Infinitely more annoying are gaggles of posh wankers who are clearly part of some choral group deciding to break into song because they are just so zany. They’re usually only seen at Christmas, thankfully. Try and make it all year round.
Ball games
Despite being an adult, have a kick around with a football in the confined space, or maybe lob a tennis ball around. When you smack some poor woman in the face, use the classic response of ball game twats everywhere: look shocked as if there was no way you could have predicted this was a bad idea, while stifling giggles like stupid little children as you scuttle off.
Harmless but unsettling act
Behaving in a genuinely strange way makes even the most compassionate passenger rapidly go from thinking ‘That guy really needs support from mental health services’ to ‘What’s that loony tunes gonna do next, get out an axe?’ The options for disturbing behaviour are many: having a conversation with yourself, changing your trousers and eating an orange with the skin on are all good. You can probably think of some more yourself. People always manage to.
