My daughter is on a long train journey and sitting in the same carriage to her is a very drunken Manchester United supporter, singing at the top of his voice (I can hear him down the phoneline.)
It reminded me of when I was seven years old and on a train with my mother and my gran. Our carriage was crammed to the brim with drunken Scottish blokes, clutching dozens of cans of McEwans lager, on their way to the Scotland vs England match at Wembley. One bloke yelled at me “Oo’s ginnae win today, lassie?” and I yelled back “Scoootland!”. He threw 50p piece towards me. This repeated itself many times over the course of the next two hours and I made a very tidy profit.
When we got off at the Stalybridge train station and my dad collected us, my gran told him that I’d been “exploiting drunken football fans, along with being disloyal to England.”
Anyway, I don’t understand why people who have special interests feel that they have to yell about it on public transport. Whenever I have caught the 323 bus to Huddersfield, have I inflicted songs about the Industrial Revolution, Coffee, Victorian Islam and Hen-Rearing on the innocent public? No, I jolly well have not.