Things to do on the tube when your iPod has died
It happens to the best of us. You’re sat on the tube when all of a sudden, the Arctic Monkeys stop singing. Great, you think to yourself, I’ve got another 30 minutes of silent tube hell. Faced with this nightmarish concept, your mind starts to wander. You’re thinking, what can I do to occupy myself? In such a grave and depressing situation, it’s amazing where the mind ends up.
You begin to look around the tube train, desperately seeking something to pacify your overactive brain. You start to look at the other passengers, it’s rush-hour so the train is quite full. After about five minutes of playing “which one of you smells of cabbage?”, you run out of games to play in your mind. Whatever you do, you can’t be seen to be staring at anyone, for therein lies danger. So you’re subtle. You casually glance around, not concentrating on any one person for too long. Yes, whatever game you come up with it can’t involve any sort of deep analysis. You’ve already aroused too much suspicion trying to sniff out the cabbage-man. You need a game that deals with split second decisions. And so, pint-or-punch is born.
Your new mission is to divide up the inhabitants of the carriage, given a single cursory glance of each, into two groups. People for whom you would buy a pint at the pub, and people for whom you would give a punch in the face. The groups are exclusive and there is no middle ground. You cannot waiver, you must make an instantaneous decision.
As you start to play, you begin to feel guilty. Sure, this isn’t life-or-death, it’s pint-or-punch, but should you really be deciding that you’d punch someone based on their looks alone. You remind yourself, for the sake of your own sanity, that you are in no way going to start punching people on the underground. This is just a thought experiment. You are, after all, extremely bored.
Your conscience is rattled even more when, having categorised an old woman as having what you’ve deemed to be a “punchable face”, you realise that a girl you’d singled out for a free pint moments before is actually her daughter. You begin to see the similarity in their faces, stumbling upon the rationale that you would have bought the woman a pint had she only been 20 years younger. Shockingly you then realise that, by your very own reasoning, that young girl is about 20 years away from a punch in the face.
Having scared yourself into intellectual meltdown, you stop playing and pickup a loose copy of the Metro.