ON THE BUS: A journey into idiocy

Now this may come as a surprise but ordinarily I’m a mild mannered kind of fellow. I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Unless the goose had specifically asked me to (perhaps to cure a fit of hiccups). But if there was going to be one thing, one insidious, pointless, idiotic cultural tic that would one day see me snap like an atrophied elastic band, grab the nearest blunt/sharp/radioactive object and start swinging away like Babe Ruth in a cloud of bees, it’s this – people on public transport who play their music through mobile phone speakers.

Where do I start? How do I begin to vent this tumour of pent-up hatred, this blood-boiling, gut-churning tidal wave of vitriol I have backed up inside me? What do I want to say to you, denizen of the back seat, ensconced inside your tattered hoodie, pustulant boils flung carelessly across your face with the lackadaisical air I have no doubt is applied to every area of your worthless, irritating life?

Well firstly I want to say, get some semblance of musical appreciation. If we have to listen to your music, if it truly is our sad lot in life to watch you play the moronic DJ to your toxic-looking mate in the seat opposite you, then at least let that music be vibrant or thoughtful or experimental or life-affirming. What we don’t want to hear is querulous, mewling cretins spewing the musical equivalent of the Ebola virus over our quivering ear holes. We’d rather not listen to the preschool ramblings of a bigoted, closed-minded, no talent, bottom feeding Nazi Media Whore just because it has a semi-rhythmic beat behind it, thank you very much.

Of course such considerations are rendered null and void because you’re playing the aforementioned musical aberration on POSSIBLY THE SINGLE WORST AUDIO PLAYBACK DEVICE IN THE UNIVERSE. When I was 4 years old I had a plastic record player made by Tomy that had better fidelity than that carcinogenic box of wires you clutch in your grubby paw. Seriously, dude, it sounds like a group of crickets are conducting a rave in a match box. And just because you’re mindlessly bobbing your head along to the white noise like a life-sized meat marionette whose operator is having a seizure, it doesn’t mean we’re suddenly going to recognise it as music.

You dead-eyed, unthinking, arrogant, attention-seeking, TURBO GIT.

Thank-you. That’s put off the stroke for another few years I reckon.