Amuse, confuse and disturb your fellow citizens with these fun suggestions for urban virgin snow mischief. These are best performed very early in the morning after a settled snowfall. The resulting patterns left in the soft white powder will then be ready to be discovered by the day’s early risers.
1. Walk around for a bit with your left shoe on your right foot, and your right shoe on your left foot.
2. Hop on one leg down the entire length of a street
3. Walk with a companion halfway down a street. At some arbitrary midpoint the lighter of the two should jump on the other and receive a piggyback the rest of the way.
4. Walk halfway down a street. At some arbitrary midpoint, pause, create some mysterious scratchy marks in the snow immediately in front of where you’ve stopped and then continue walking in the direction you were initially travelling but facing the other way. If you’re worried about bumping into things while walking backwards, you could attempt to put your shoes on the wrong way around, although this might not be as straightforward as it sounds.
5. Cut some human hand shapes out of rubber, wood, or half a potato, and strap one to the underside of each of your shoes. Experiment with various sizes of hand, from tiny baby hands to freakish over-sized monster hands with terrifying spindly elongated fingers.
6. As above but instead of human hands, replicate the paw/hoof prints of various animals. There are lots of variations of this idea – the one you choose might depend on how subtle you wish to be, or how perceptive and intelligent you believe your intended audience to be:
a) prints of species that would not be expected to be present in your town. A kangaroo in Doncaster, a Shropshire Rhinoceros in Staffordshire, a sperm whale in Tamworth (I know sperm whales don’t have characteristic paw prints, but maybe they’d slither along the ground in a distinctive manner – do some research).
b) prints significantly larger than the current largest known example of that species. You might wander into your local pub in the evening to frenzied reports of an upright 10 foot tall Etruscan shrew stalking the area and causing people to disappear.
c) prints of species hitherto unknown to science.
d) waddle down the street as a penguin, but with your left shoe as a Magellanic penguin, your right shoe as a Western Rockhopper.
e) dressed as an upright 10 foot tall Etruscan shrew, carry two small children on your back. The children could have fake penguin feet prints on their shoes. At some arbitrary point in the street, stop, let the children down from your back, change your shoes into some penguin feet prints, and then the three of you walk off in different directions.
f) with the help of two small children, enact three tiny Etruscan shrews merging into one gigantic supershrew
g) get a friend to don gazelle hoof print shoes. You should put on some lion paw print shoes. Get your friend to chase you, the lion, zig-zagging in a manner consistent with a real lion chasing a real gazelle (i.e. prey becomes predator). This will work best in an empty car park rather than the street. After a while, stop in the centre of the car park, make some marks in the snow as if there’s been a scuffle, jump on your friend (the gazelle)’s back and return home.
h) carry a bag or backpack with a number of custom shoes, each one of them of one of humankind’s ancient ancestors. Leave your house as a pierolapithecus and swap your shoes every 20 yards or so, evolving down the street as you go. Alternatively, you could start out human and regress to a shapeless slithery thing by the time you get to the end of the road.