12. Woman B: Carry out a citizen’s arrest

There’s something very officious and camp about the word citizen. Citizen Kane. Citizen Smith. Citizen’s arrest. I’ve never head of anyone making a successful ‘citizen’s arrest’ but I really hope it happens. Like writing a cheque on a cow, it’s part of a compelling, eccentric folklore surrounding the British legal system, and in a country where judges wear wigs and policemen sometimes ride around on horseback you can just about imagine ‘citizens arrests’ are carried out regularly on street corners and shopping centres up and down the country – that they have an essential role to play in our national constitution.

Knowing nothing about it, I assume that I am entitled to make a citizen’s arrest if I see someone committing a crime. As I’m the citizen making the arrest, however, I think I’ll be the judge of the crime. I’d like to arrest people who spit in the street. I’d gladly cuff those who hedge their bets at tills or cash-points, standing miles back and in the middle rather than committing to a queue like a decent person would. People who press the button and cross the road before the beeper goes, needlessly holding up traffic later. People who work in shops and don’t tell you the amount, simply expecting you to crane your neck round and read it off the till. People who didn’t read the Terms & Conditions even though they said they did. People who don’t do up their seat-belts when the light flashes, people who don’t take a minute to familiarise themselves with the safety information, people who forget to leave a tip and people who sit on the aisle side on busy trains, forcing others to stand. People who put empty packets back in the cupboards. These will be my first targets.

11. Man A: Steal something from a shop

I don’t think I’ve ever stolen anything. Of course, I’ve come home from many jobs laden with liberated stationary, but I don’t think a box of Biros and hole punches really count as grand larceny. And stealing from work isn’t really a crime – it’s more a form of additional National Insurance. When I was 12 I used to nick spare change off my parents when I thought they weren’t looking. It all got spent on comics. I was hardly pawning the family jewels to subsidise my smack habit. I wasn’t Zammo; I was a nice, middle-class boy.

Petty theft is supposed to be one of the teenage rites of passage; kids in uniform, all attitude and skinny ties, scurrying out of a local shop with pockets full of palmed trinkets, blatantly ignoring the “no more than 3 schoolchildren in the shop at any one time” notice scribbled on card on the front door. But I was always terrified that I’d be caught and sent to jail, where I’d have to fight kids from council estates who had been handling sawn-off shotguns since the age of five.

Nowadays, every time I go into HMV, I find myself eyeing the dalek-like security cameras on the ceiling, wondering if they are being monitored, curious to know if there’s a security guard in a small, sweaty office looking at a screen and murmuring: “IC1 male, thirties, eying up the Powell and Pressburger box-set. All systems on alert.” I paw the DVDs in my hand, knowing that a quick tug and the security tag on the cellophane will fall to the floor. Beads of sweat appearing on the back of my neck as I ponder the ease with which I could slip items into my bag. And then I mentally rehearse how I’ll idly wander out of the shop, neither rushing nor dawdling, before the security guard pulls me aside and I furiously protest my innocence and explain that there’s been a terrible mistake. I can visualise the episode of Crimewatch in which Nick Ross appeals to viewers to identify the scowling menace who has been plaguing local high streets. “Don’t have nightmares,” he says, as the camera zooms in on my face, haunted by a kind of empty dread.

Then I think better of it and put the DVDs back on the shelf.

It’s not about the money – if I really wanted a DVD or a book or a CD I could buy it without worry. It’s the sense of getting something for nothing, of beating the system, of being one of the crafty geezers who is always one step ahead of the game – that’s what appeals to me. I like the idea that I could walk into a shop with empty hands and walk out with a bag labelled “swag”. Although I would probably avoid wearing a striped jumper and a mask.

10. Man A: Piss in a postbox

As a younger man, when I used to go drinking in Camden or Soho, I would often find myself walking home in darkness, alone in an empty street, with a bladder full of piss. And at those moments, drunk as I was, I found it quite hard to resist the urge to relieve myself in a postbox. Oh, I could have pissed in an alleyway or in a leafy front garden, but there was something so very alluring about the vacant slot of my red, cast-iron friend.

Let me tell you, I came close once or twice. Short as I am, it was quite hard to even concieve of arranging myself into such a position where I could piss into a postbox. I imagine a very tall man could simply insert his cock into the post-box and let nature take its course. That was never an option for me.

I remember once talking to a postman, and he told me: “Anything you that someone can fit into a postbox, we’ve found in there. Anything.” That’s quite a bold claim. What about Lady Di’s fingernails? They’d fit in a postbox, but I doubt the postman has ever found them nestling on top of a pile of manila envelopes. I think he was talking about more banal, but grim discoveries, such as used condoms, bloody syringes and parcels full of shit.

I was once cautioned by the police for pissing in someone’s doorway. They waited for me to finish and zip myself up, and then swooped down on me in a blur of blue lights – surely they would have been better off stopping me from doing it in the first place. They gave me a stern talking to, and I was contrite and apologetic. I suspect that most people caught pissing in public probably get arrested because they are so incredulous that the police are actually cautioning them for having a slash in public that they get all bolshy and defensive and start asking why the boys in blue aren’t out catching real criminals. Whereas I merely hung my head in shame and promised never to do it again.

So, in hindsight, I’m quite pleased with myself for never pissing in a postbox, but I know my time will come.

9. Woman B: Spend a night in prison

I like to think I live life on the edge. I’ve dropped out of university. Yes, I went back, but the fact is I dropped out once and none of you wage-slaves can ever take that away from me. I’ve taken 11 things down the 10 items or less aisle. Sometimes I only have four a day. I know, I’m a regular Howard Marks. Yet – despite this compelling evidence of my challenging rebellious character, and the fact that I’ve been out with at least three people who’ve been in prison and several more who probably should have – I’ve never been arrested, myself.

One flatmate regularly stumbled home early on a Saturday morning covered in body fluids, with the contents of his pockets neatly packed into police-issue clear plastic bags. I was strangely jealous of his life, pathetic, shambling and alcohol-dependent as it was. And as I looked into those bleary still-drunk eyes I’d think of all the wrongful imprisonments through history… the Oscar Wildes and the Andy Dufresnes and the Anne Boleyns, and I’d wonder – did he do it? Sometimes ‘it’ would be ‘urinate down the escalators’, other times ‘punch a policeman’, and the answer in every case would be ‘Yes. Yes. He definitely did it’.

When I’m ‘banged up’, though, it’ll be for something terrifically romantic, a terrible mistake that’s clear to everyone but those damn pen-pushers we call the arbiters of justice. Loved ones will come and see me and we’ll talk to each other using an old-fashioned telephone, even though we’re only sitting a few feet apart and the glass isn’t sound-proof. Little Billy sends his love, they’ll say, and I’ll tell them not to bring him here. It’s no place for a goat. I’ll say I’m doing fine, but when they’ve gone I’ll allow myself to shed a tear. I’ll put a picture of little Billy up next to my bed, and, eventually, I’ll dig my way out using plastic forks I’ve been palming from the prison canteen, hiding the soil under a really tall hat I’ve inexplicably taken to wearing.  What a woman, they will say. What motivated her to act with such conviction? She was only being kept in overnight.

8. Man A: Tell a gangsta that his trousers are falling down

In my time I’ve worn ripped jeans, graffiti’d jeans and drainpipes that made my cock and balls far too visible to curious passers-by. But I’ve never worn jeans so baggy and low-slung that my pants (and indeed arse) are fully on display.

As a teenager my parents would occasionally chide me for my choice of clothes, but I suspect that with the meltdown of my family, they had bigger fish to fry than my taste in jackets so I got off fairly lightly. It’s a sign of my inevitable ageing that I look at youngsters on the bus, with their underpants on show to every bewildered pensioner, and I really want to take them aside and explain to them that not everyone wants to see their bum crack peering through a pair of thin ASDA boxer shorts.

Sadly, I’ve yet to confront any wannabe gangstas and tell that their trousers are falling down. For the same reason that I’ve never complained to a rudeboy who is playing Fiddy Cent out loud on his Motorola boombox; which is that the people who wear baggy jeans are the same people that the tabloids warn us will stab strangers in the face for looking at them funny. So I merely tut and sigh and grind my teeth. One day I hope to pass one of them a discreet note with reference to their trousers, before skipping off the bus and disappearing into a crowd.

Part of me wants to enjoy a cheerful, live and let live attitude towards trousers. And part of me is a seething ball of rage, determined to uphold the values that never mattered to me in the first place. Mostly, I suspect, I want to ensure that, with their denim slung around their ankles, the teens of today aren’t having any more fun than I was when I was 16. Jealousy is powerful motivation, especially when disguised as pompous anger.

7. Woman B: Get enormously fat

I’ve never been big, really. A lot of people would say I’m ‘lucky’ but the unexciting fact is I just don’t eat very much. There really is no great secret to it. It helps if you can cultivate a keen nervous energy and sensitive teeth. Most of the time I’m happy with the arrangement, but there are days when I do wonder what it would be like to have no awareness of boundaries regarding food and the body. To eat and eat just for the love of it, with no concern for health or appearance. Women talk about ‘experiencing pregnancy’ as a vital part of womanhood as though an unused womb makes you deficient, a let-down or dishonour to your gender. I think experiencing tremendous obesity has all the benefits of pregnancy with none of the drawbacks, plus of course men can join in, too. As women age, we’re told we can ‘choose between our face and our body’. As far as I’m concered, the only way to win is not to play: I’m choosing neither.

As women, we give ourselves a hard time about food and our bodies. Women who aren’t thin want to be slim. Slim women want to be ill. But why? Thinness comes with an implication of high-maintenance, intimidating self-control and neurosis. No one ever said the thin people were a happy people.

I’d like to be huge. I’d like to need a sit down half way up the stairs. I’d like to drape myself in ex-army parachutes and demand a wheelchair at the airport. I’d like to make the other people in the lift nervous. But mostly, I’d like not to care. Now, I don’t think I’m particularly concerned about my size. I don’t exercise conscious restraint or have any unusual determination to stay active; I’m just the way I am. It’s like having small handwriting or needing a lot of sleep – part of the unplanned idiosyncratic make-up of the individual. Yet somehow, for me morbid obesity is associated with a deliciously breezy, easygoing freedom – I can’t help but be drawn to it like a moth to a big fat flame.

Obscene fatness is a ticket to all kinds of otherwise unacceptable behaviour, it’d be disappointing to people if you were massive but weren’t a bit disgusting and gluttonous. Some people climb mountains just because they’re there; I’d like the freedom to become a human mountain just because I’m fat. The freedom to completely indulge every compulsion. That special, unique freedom to command intrigued admiration and more than one seat on public transport.

6. Woman B: Be in a train crash

I don’t want to be in a plane or car crash. That would just be horrible. A train crash, however, is almost a joke. For a start, it’s very, very unlikely to be my fault, and in my fantasy I get to lead the others down the tracks, lighters aloft like fans at an itinerant U2 concert. I often find myself on a train, looking at the people around me and wondering what they’d be like in an emergency.

These days whenever there’s a loud noise, or the lights go off, or the brakes do something unexpected, you can almost hear everyone on the tube thinking: “This is it. I’m either going to die or be on the news.”

Trains are different to other modes of transport. They have an air of banal safety about them that makes it very difficult to reconcile them with any kind of real danger. They make friendly tooting noises and historically have big smiley faces on the front. Even in the shadow of terrorism and the rail crashes of recent years, it’s impossible to take trains seriously.

So some stupid, fame-mad, thrill-seeking part of me will always be able to put horror aside and find time to be strangely envious of anyone who has experienced derailments and blown-up carriages. I’d go so far as to say that I actually hope one day there’s a massive explosion in the carriage in front and somehow miraculously I and everyone else gets to walk away without a scratch. But we’ll all have felt that heightened fear, and we’ll be united in our relief. That’s my dream. And if you’re honest, I bet it’s yours, too.

5. Man A: Talk to a woman in a burkha

I am, by nature, someone who likes talking. And I am also someone who wants to be liked. And such, despite my best intentions to the contrary, I often find myself talking to strangers. Mostly at bus-stops, but also sometimes in newsagents or just in the street, particularly if we’ve just seen someone get mugged or hit by a car. Nothing starts a conversation quicker than a car crash.

And I often find myself standing at a bus-stop alongside women in burkhas, head to toe in black, with only their eyes exposed to the world. And sooner or later, I know that I will have to give into temptation and start talking to one of them, just to see what happens.

Now, I’m no theological expert in Muslim law. I know that the burkha is supposed to make a woman modest and stop them being sexually propositioned by men they don’t know. But I don’t know if a woman wearing a burkha is not supposed to talk to men at all. I hope not. I mean, it would be a terrible thing to be that cut off from your fellow citizens, that you couldn’t just have a chat with someone you didn’t know.

Obviously, I wouldn’t say anything offensive. I’d stick to the usual, banal openings. I’d say:

“This weather we’re having! Some summer this turned out to be,” or

“The traffic here is terrible, isn’t it?” or

“What a start to the season for Spurs!”

And then I’d wait to see what happened next. Would she blank me? Would she politely ask me to stop talking to her. Or would she happily reply? I really hope for the latter. And that she’s a Spurs fan.

4. Woman B: Make your funeral preparations

Making arrangements for your funeral needn’t be morbid. It’s OK to want to do it, and if I’m honest I’ve put more thought into the details of my last party than it’s really socially acceptable to admit. It might be the privilege of the young to have fun with this. When we’re young, pension plans and all thoughts of old age and mortality are addressed with joyous detachment. It’s all part of the newly-fledged grown-up party, like planning your wedding or choosing the decor for the spare room. Death is something that happens to other people, except we know it’s not really, so let’s do a joke about someone thumping out ‘ding dong the witch is dead’ on an old piano when our time comes. When we’re old, I imagine funerial thoughts are dampened by acceptance, maybe even the pride of ownership. Funerals belong to the old. But we can make our plans at any time, and we should – practically, sensitively, honestly… because we never know how long we’ve got.

We’ve all thought about funeral songs. Most teenagers joke they’ll have something outrageous like ‘rape me’ by Nirvana but in the end their sobbing friends veto it in favour of ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams. Old people, in my experience, end up with whatever cassette their grown-up children rescued from their stereo on its way to Oxfam.

I want Rules & Regulations by PiL played at my funeral. And if he outlives me, I want John Lydon to come, in person, to sing it. Yes, I want them to book John Lydon. It is, quite literally, what I would have wanted. They can’t not do it. Even if that mean there’s no money left for a proper coffin and they have to shunt my twisted remains down the aisle in an old bathtub. Of course it would be fun to leave an instruction that your pets are buried with you or something like that, but you have to be responsible.

3. Woman B: Drive on the motorway

I’ve never driven before. Growing up on the Isle of Man, all my friends were passing their tests at 16 and getting their ‘provisionals’ even before that. I felt like I had all the time in the world. Turned out I didn’t, and one by one all my friends overtook me, both metaphorically and literally, with their newfound driving skills. Now it’s getting to the point where I might as well cut out the middle man and just learn to drive one of those little disability buggies.

Although I’ve never driven, I’ve seen loads people do it and I reckon I’ve picked up the basics. An awful lot of people can drive, and statistically at least half of them must be stupider than me. I’ve got two degrees, for goodness sake – to be honest, I just don’t think I need your ‘lessons’. I find the suggestion I might need someone to show me how to push a pedal or turn a wheel rather patronising. So before I shuffle off this mortal coil (possibly very shortly before) I’d like to have a go at teaching myself some driving, preferably on a motorway which I imagine to be the easiest place to learn to drive of all, since it’s basically just going along really fast in a straight line for ages. Like canal boating or piloting a plane during take-off, both of which I also imagine I would be quite good at.

As I understand it, driving is quite straightforward. As easy as ABC, in fact – the pedals are even arranged Accelerator, Brake, Clutch. I’m not sure what the clutch is for, but hopefully I can get away without using it. There are usually five gears and the faster you go, the higher the gear you need. It’s very much like riding a bike. There’s a wand that you waggle to make the windscreen wipers on for comic effect when you’ve done a sneeze. There are little pictures of things like oil cans that light up at various times to cheer up the driver, which I find rather charming. And there’s a steering wheel which is like the captain’s wheel on a ship. Traffic conditions are, I think, to be treated like violent storms at sea, and it’s best to heave the wheel violently left and right to keep an even keel.

OK, pass me the keys. I think I’d be pretty good at driving. For at least five seconds before the fatal collision.