Games people play

Murray Lachlan Young, 28, poet and satirist.

As a metropolitan Londoner, I play the Tube Game. This is where you check out all the reflections in the glass of underground trains to see who you're sitting next to. Everyone in London plays this game - you'll often see businessmen ogling young ladies - but they all pretend they don't.

People do like looking at each other, but it can be dangerous. Sometimes you might feel the energy of intense weirdness coming from the person sitting two seats away, and you think: "Oh, I'll just check who that is." It's usually someone who has been waiting to catch you looking at them, so they can attack you in some way.

I was playing another of my solitary games the other day. Somebody had said something very rude to me earlier on in a meeting, and I was working on a hindsight put-down line. It was something about somebody waggling at me the blunt instrument which I presumed they thought was their wit. Something along those lines; or I could have said: "My car is parked on a double yellow line, and I'm afraid I'll have to go and talk to the traffic warden."

The best put-down I've ever heard was on television recently. A man on a talk-show programme asked a woman a very suggestive question, and all she said was: "'Scuse me. I'm goin' go feed ma dawwwg."

I get very tense and nervous, and if you want me to be horribly western about it, then games can be a good way of letting off steam. I'm one of life's natural junkies, as it were; often in the state which most people take drugs to reach, so for me, games are a natural barbiturate. Did I mention that I've played football ever since I shook hands with the England captain and goalkeeper David Seaman?

Murray Lachlan Young's latest book, "Casual Sex and other verse", is published by Bantam Books, price pounds 7.99.