Tomfoolery aboard the 7.33 to Yanagawa

Having discovered that I had somehow acquired a clown's hand horn sometime during the stag night, I was determined to put it to some good use this morning on the usually dull and uneventful train journey to work. As a fan of surreal comedy and having an eye and ear for the ridiculous it was an opportunity that I just couldn't miss.

So there I was, amongst a throng of young professionals and school students as the train rattled smoothly toward its destination. My hand already in my coat pocket, I gave the horn a few half squeezes (a trial run in my apartment showed that the sound only comes after three or four contractions) and then a big one.

The resultant honk was a little quieter than I had hoped, although it was loud enough to make most people jump a little. What followed was what we practical jokers like to call the cream. Being Japanese commuters and mostly strangers, noone was willing to raise the obvious questions ("what was that?", "was that a horn?"), so there was a lot of pretending it didn't happen, covert glances to see if a culprit could be spotted and a great deal of blank expressions (the latter obviously because the idea of a horn being sounded on a train was completely not in keeping with Japanese protocol and thus dismissed). It was for the latter of this group that I gave a second toot a few minutes later, and now even they were shooting glances everywhere. One man even went so far as to sigh and pretend to look at the destination map as if he was lost in order to glance around when he turned back.

Was I rumbled? Not as far as I can tell, but I must have been a prime suspect, being one of those crazy, unpredictable foreigners in a big coat. Would I care if I had been rumbled? Not a chance. If bringing a bit of harmless Pythonian humour to a morning commute is a crime, lock me up and throw away the key.