eastender said:
The following tips should make your SC/bar experiences safer and more enjoyable:
4.) Avoid eye contact
Good advice, which I often forget/ignore.
Those who find eye contact a provocation for attack, often are not, I have discovered, aficionados of clever wit and repartee.
When I lock eyes with some over-refreshed, pugnacious, muscular, malevolent, malcontent and he demands, in something less then honeyed tones:
"What the fuck are you looking at four eyes?"
I try to win him over with a witty response, that would allow him to demonstrate some modest self-deprecation after which we would then, figuratively at least, join hands and belt out a few verses of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing".
Hence my reply, with a smattering of smugness:
"That Sir, is a most interesting, but I fear not easily answered, question!"
And then as Dave Broadfoot's oft promoted Renfrew would say:
"When I come to..."