Surprisingly fun, provided of course you're in a medium to large
group, and your
carriage is full of businessmen and women pretending not to notice the
pissed up rugby team singing in the carriage.
It's a curious juxtaposition, that to play in rugby matches you normally turn up in a shirt and tie. You proceed to get absolutely out of your head in the same garb. An attempt to disguise drunkenness behind the cloth of respectability? Perhaps. It's amusing, and it serves as a bond between players while out, so that's a good thing.
Anyway, singing. On the tube. Picture a carriage of besuited businesspeople, sitting, trying to look calm and collected. In stumble the tattered remnants of the winning fresher's rugby team. We've been singing along the streets, and in the long subway tunnel which connects South Kensington station to, well, South Kensington. We hop on board, and realise that we must stand for the 10 minute journey.
Then, someone strikes up the song ...
All
I used to work in Chicago, in an old department store.
I used to work in Chicago, I don't work there any more ...
Soloist
A lady came in, and asked for some PAPER!
All
Some paper from the store?
Soloist
Paper she wanted, a ream she got, and I don't work there any more!
There are a variety of fun pairs - helicopter clearly links to my chopper, rooster similarly to my cock. Only the mathematically devoted could connect writing Newton-Raphson to pen-iteration, however.
The fun of it was heightened by watching the aforementioned businesspeople as we sang. Quite a few were listening along, and trying to stop grinning at the better lyrics. I feel we provided a service to them, brightening up what was otherwise a dull saturday in their life. As we stepped off the tube, I wondered how they would remember us - as drunken, frivolous intrusions disturbing an otherwise peaceful ride home, or as an example of teamwork, friendship, and enjoyment.
I was personally struck by the dichotomy that the sitation represented. You had two separate poles of human society - a group of people, crammed together in a two metre wide metal tube, who were all utterly silent - not talking to each other, pretending to ignore all external stimuli, a well lit carriage which could have been empty for all the soul and life it projected to the echoing stations it passed. These people dress the same, and do fundamentally the same jobs, day in, day out, yet are silent and ignore their fellow commuters.
We are a similarly bonded group of people, brought together by our love of rugby and drinking, preferably in that order. Where there was emptiness, and silence, we brought brightness and song. For a few, brief minutes, our group's paths crossed, and the carriage was alive. As we stepped off the train, it felt as if something had died, as the singing died away, and the once more silent carriage echoed into the darkness. We had left, but what had returned? Peace, or stagnation?