What would you have done in this situation?

I was barrelling into town on the Northern line during the 8am rush on Thursday. No seats free, so I executed the wide stance no hands stand, and whipped out my phone, which had only been in my pocket for the one step journey from platform to carriage.
After one stop a foldy seat came free, and as a bonus the big lad leaving it had warmed it up. I had my gym bag with me so I couldn’t ask for more, foldys being the British Airways of tube seating, in contrast to my Ryanair friends two doors down with their bags forcing them into an unjudged manspread or on their laps.

As soon as I sat down, I realised there was a wasp on my thigh.

Yep.

Hardly a surprise given my recent leg training provided it with an A380 friendly runway to land on. I flicked it onto the floor and went back to my phone. I couldn’t care for wasps, I secretly hope a sting will one day put me out of my misery, but I know a good chunk of the great British public hate them. Even so, obviously all I was doing post-flick was watching the wasp out of the corner of my eye.

It was either dying or had missed its stop, because it was walking everywhere and buzzing less than those of us who had received ten near-identical newsletters overnight. It walked across the tube to the guy opposite me and one to the right, and was about to go out of sight and onto his bag.

Dilemma 1: Would you have alerted the bloke?

I did not. I decided to squirm inside with regret instead. By this point there were definitely people down the carriage who knew about the wasp, but like me were playing the game and staring through their phones. No naive grads on their first day of work in our shop.

After a painfully long 20 seconds, the bloke realised there was a wasp sauntering between his trousers and his bag. He shook himself like a wet dog. By this point I had been pressing my right eye against its corner for so long I was getting a headache, but I had to keep pretending I cared about item 12 on the FT’s morning newsletter.
The guy eventually zero’d in on the wasp and flicked it away. He’d obviously played this game before because despite only moving it 3cm away, he had crucially spun it around so it was walking back over to my side of the carriage. Seems we also had a wily old fox on the tube…
He went back to his phone, which I’m pretty sure was upside down and had screen lock on.

The wasp’s trajectory was an as-the-crow-doesn’t-fly straight line towards the big guy to my right.
My mind wondered away to the big-guy-big-guy dynamic which existed on the foldys before I sat down. My-seat-guy must have been cocked to the left, posing for at least a three-quarter profile portrait.
I was dragged back to the present by not-my-seat-big-guy next to me, who had been playing the game throughout, but was now trained on the wasp and absolutely bricking it. He’d pushed himself so far back into his seat that my now blurring right pupil thought it was empty. When the wasp was 30cm from him, it forgot the old adage that wasps/dogs/hoodies can smell fear, and turned back towards me – its old master, the Honeyman.

I was still trying to look at my phone and care about hereditary peers, but my black and yellow burden remained the only thing I could think about. It continued its route and when it got 20cm away from me I had a decision to make. With five stops left to go, getting up early wasn’t an option, especially if I wanted to retain my name as the Black Sheep of the Northern Line.

Dilemma 2: What would you have done next?

Without looking away from my phone, I lifted my right foot and with the heavy heel of an overpriced school shoe, I delivered a single thump of a stamp. One fatality and it wasn’t the guy who knew OPEC’s latest production figures.

I decided to nonverbally consult one other passenger. I chose the guy sitting directly opposite me, who was the only one of us four foldys who remembered to apply his jungle spray that morning. I looked up at him, this simple act was a huge relief to my headache as well as my fear I was two stops from becoming boss-eyed. He gave me a grimace, which made me think I’d made the wrong decision. But then he gave me a slight head tilt which told me he knew I did what I had to do. I did the classic ‘palms up and shrug’ to say “I know, but what could I do?”, except I didn’t do the palms bit, I couldn’t draw any more attention to myself.

The rest of the carriage definitely saw what I did, but I didn’t dare look over at them. I know you shouldn’t kill stuff in public, I’m even a cup and paper man above ground, but I had to do it… for them. Hero need, not hero deserve etc. etc.

I quickly lifted my foot to see if the wasp was nicely pancaked to the floor, or unnervingly stuck to my sole. Obviously it was the latter. I couldn’t be seen to be making a meal of trying to scrape it off, so I went back to my phone, set a reminder to “Get wasp off shoe” for 15 minutes time, and returned to a journalist telling me how the Bank of England is going to cut rates while raising them.