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27th Feb 2017

#BagelGate is simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen in Britain

What is wrong with this country?

Rich Cooper

This video is currently blowing up on Twitter. It is a video that comprises many things.

It has drunken people on a train. It has people fighting. It has people stopping people from fighting. It has chanting. It has people throwing things out of windows. It has people telling other people to fuck off. It, honestly, has everything.

But above all else, it has a bagel on top of man’s head. Several bagels, in fact, on top of a man’s head. The bagel(s) on top of this man’s head is the heart – the central theme, if you will – of this slice of English life.

There’s no point explaining it further, as words cannot do it justice, so you’d better just watch it.

That may well be the most extraordinary video you see this year. Now in the headline, you’ll notice that we’ve said this is simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen in Britain, and we shall explain why.

It is the worst because most people, at some stage in their life, have been made to feel like the man with a bagel on his head (MWABOHH), or as this event will surely pass into folklore and develop into an idiom, feel like a man with a bagel on his head.

There’s no getting round the fact that this is bullying. You could write it off as banter, but then you’d be the kind of person that writes bullying off as banter, and therefore are a prick. Anyone with any kind of empathy feels terrible for the MWABOHH and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

However, we did also say that it’s the best thing to ever happen in Britain, absolutely not because it’s bullying, but because it couldn’t happen anywhere else. In no other country could anything this gargantuanly stupid happen. In no other country could the combination of loutish drunkenness, disrespect for public transport and apparent abundance of bagels happen.

And then the police turn up. The police turn up to investigate a bagel being repeatedly put on a man’s head. Good or bad, if that’s not the most British thing of all time, we don’t know what is.

Topics:

Bagel,British