How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People

Say “sweet enough already” when someone offers sugar, and “white enough already” when they offer milk

Never go on a date with a dancer. They always try to pay for things “with a dance”.

Walk up to the altar in a church and try to blow out all the votive candles in one breath, like it's a birthday cake.

When you see people feeding pigeons in the park, pretend one of them is yours. Give it a name and with increasing frustration, keep calling it back.

Tell people that Oscar Wilde’s last words were “I told you I was gay”

If you are fourteen, and into the supernatural, spell your age like this: “Fortean”

Help yourself to one of the free dogs that people leave outside shops

At a wine-tasting event, remember you should never swallow the wine. Always spit it out onto the floor.

When driving slowly down hills in residential areas, always remember to shout “NO BRAKES!” out of the car window

Get on a bus on a hot day and ask the driver if he’s got any Callippos

Tell children that, just like military men, dinner ladies are traditionally buried in uniform

Describe people going out with much more attractive people as being “20,000 leagues under the sea”

Describe people who are pointlessly proud of things as “whyumphant”

Live your life in alphabetical order

Put on cardboard 3D glasses when you sit down to the computer in the morning, at the cinema… or simply at home watching TV

Measure the difficulty of games and puzzles in units of the cubic rube

Become “known to the police”, but for good things, like handing in keys frequently or getting your valuables tagged

Hide in someone’s car boot for a medium length journey

Take insulin as a recreational drug

Act as someone else’s eyes and ears when they already have perfectly serviceable ones of their own

Interpret real life events as if they are part of a dream

Hassle the Hoff

Call your home your “shell”

Try to work out where the imaginary face would be on various inanimate objects

Use the comments section of someone else’s blog to start your own hypotaxical micro-blog

Refer to white people’s dreadlocks as “wedlocks”

Refer to your flatmates as “flo-mos” and your housemates as “ho-mos”

Imagine that the titles of novels are the titles of sitcoms, and invent a plausible corresponding plot concept

Write “take care — you are our future” in leaving cards of people less than four years younger than yourself

Help young people across the road, because they are “our future”

Send Valentine’s cards to people who have recently interviewed you for jobs

Address letters to a pillarbox

Insert extra syllables into words, as if you are an old person: “escialator” “Holland & Barnett”

Ask the hotel staff if you can put the twin beds in your room together, then put them end to end, and lie across the gap

Refer to music that sounds a bit like The Prodigy as “prodigious”

Describe people as “unconventionally ugly”

Start an exam essay question with “Ooh, I was hoping you’d ask that”

Refer to wages lost due to flu as the “congestion charge”

Put your Oyster card in a sandwich and scan that

Become Avid Merrion’s celebrity stalker

Call the London Eye the “London Eyesore”

Put a “London Nose” on the fourth plinth

Refer to all public clocks as “Big Bens”

Put Big Ben on the fourth plinth

Like people who are clever, but not those who are “clever clever”

If you take your own bags to the supermarket, why not your own trolley?

Remember to announce "Cross the road!" loudly when the green man lights up.

Tell people that the button must be pressed once for each person who intends to cross at the pelican crossing so it knows how long to beep for.

Pay people to provide you with above-board information. Eg ask someone for directions then, as you walk off, furtively press a fiver into their hand. Or walk into a shop and ask a sales assistant if they sell a certain thing, all the while letting them see a wad of notes in your inside pocket.

Tell people that in her heyday Margaret Thatcher's nickname was "The Iron Maiden"

Tell people those stickers you get on fruit are actually edible

Tell people that Stan Laurel’s last words were “Kiss me, Hardy”

Cheer up the grieving. Make two bluetack eyes and a smiley mouth and stick them to gravestones.

After you ‘doff’ your hat to the Vice-Chancellor at your graduation, don’t forget to place it gently back on the Vice-Chancellor’s head

Only see the last film in a series, because it’s the least buggy version

Go to the hairdressers and claim to have brought in a picture of a celebrity with the "do" that you're going for. Have this picture be of yourself, taken a couple of weeks earlier, with slightly shorter hair. (by Matt Langham)

Go to the hairdressers and claim to have brought in a picture of a celebrity with the "do" that you're going for. Have this picture be of yourself, taken a couple of weeks earlier, with slightly shorter hair. (by Matt Langham)

Go to the hairdressers and claim to have brought in a picture of a celebrity with the "do" that you're going for. Have this picture be of yourself, taken a couple of weeks earlier, with slightly shorter hair. (by Matt Langham)