I recently decided to leave my car keys at home and travel by coach from London to Bristol. Forget hunching over the wheel for the hours – I could sit back and relax and let someone else do the driving for a change. Hey, I could finish White Lotus season three – even read a book.
Plus, let’s face it, I couldn’t afford the train fare. A cross-country return ticket would have cost more than £100, whereas the coach came in under a tenner. It was a no-brainer.
I also hadn’t been on a proper coach trip since I was at school and, for some reason, was rather excited. And, when I boarded, it was actually quite nice – thumbs up to the National Express for its reasonable leg room and sardonic drivers making some anti-tourist lols on loudspeaker. Double guns to my double seat with one seat unoccupied! Shame about the toilet being out of action – or rather, what a stroke of luck.
But then my halcyon day-tripping took a sudden and distinct turn downwards, because the woman across the aisle from me decided to watch a movie on her laptop... at full volume. Without headphones. I know.
It didn’t matter that it was actually a good choice of film – the 2005 Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen version of Pride and Prejudice, since you asked. But what fresh hell was this?
Decidedly routine hell, actually. As anyone who’s a commuter will know, ever since smartphones were fitted with a built-in speaker (some time in 2007), headphone-dodgers have been a scourge on our trains, buses and coaches, but especially London Underground. Since it has got noticeably worse after the Covid pandemic – during which we learned to live in our own little bubbles, and all civic niceties went out of the window – there’s now a name for it: “bare-beating”.
And despite new efforts, announced this week, to curb it – the mayor of London Sadiq Khan has rolled out a new campaign to tackle “nuisance” offenders, amounting to what appears to be putting up a few posters in Tube carriages – I’m going to hazard that it simply won’t make any difference.
I’m not just being neggy, I just think that, realistically, the kind of people who are socially unaware (or inept) enough to play their own terrible music from their phones or to flick blithely through dozens of TikTok reels without consideration to those around them probably aren’t going to take any notice of a poster urging them to “Travel Kind”.
And that’s because the kind of people who play their “guilty pleazures playlist” out loud on a packed Tube carriage at 7.53 in the morning, feat. Ed Sheeran wailing “Girl, you know I want your love... your love was handmade for somebody like me” – or, the arguably less offensive Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP (“Yeah, you ******* with some ***-*** *****”), either a) genuinely believe we all want to hear it, because their taste in music is so brilliant; or b) don’t give a monkey’s.
They’re playing it out loud because they want to play it out loud. They like playing it out loud.
Some of them probably take a deep and twisted pleasure in being a nuisance. And a few posters stretching across the entire TfL network isn’t going to stop them or make them think twice about being antisocial. Those only work on people who wouldn’t dream of sharing their friend’s 15-minute voicenote about her cat’s latest trip to the vet with an entire bus full of strangers, in the first place.
And while yes, it’s good that the mayor is doing something – even if it’s ineffectual, the initiative at least marks the behaviour out as a problem – I just wish he had gone further. After all, there’s already been a prod from both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives urging ministers to take action, with the shadow transport secretary Richard Holden amusingly going as far as to say that passengers should not have to “endure somebody else’s choice of crap music”.
The Lib Dems have suggested fines of up to £1,000, saying TfL should follow in the footsteps of Irish Rail (the transport provider has introduced £86 fines for rail passengers who vape and watch videos out loud onboard). But I think slapping offenders with an on-the-spot £150 penalty – like the Fixed Penalty Notices for dropping litter, including cigarette butts – would do it.
It’s hefty enough to be properly offputting, to make sure you never do it again – but not so ridiculous that it cripples oblivious (or young and stupid) offenders in a serious cost-of-living crisis. My guess is that being stung for £150 would be enough to put them off listening to Tyler, The Creator for life – or at least, on the Elizabeth Line – and isn’t that doing us all a public service?
In my case, when confronted with Pride And Prejudice blaring at top volume on the coach, I did what any self-respecting Brit would do: glared at her a lot, tutted and sighed and shook my head, but ultimately said nothing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a volume button, must be in want of an eye-roll from their fellow passenger. Now, let that eye-roll come straight from the Mayor of London – and hit them in the pocket, where it would really hurt.
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