The capital’s transport authority will erect signs aimed at noisy mobile phone users. Might the next stop be relative calm and a bit more civility?
There is that scene in so many westerns films, of the kind forever playing on daytime TV, when all seems lost but suddenly the cavalry comes riding over the horizon.
The cavalry came to save me this week and they were wearing the uniforms of Transport for London, which runs the buses and many of the railways in the capital. TfL, as it is known, wants all who play stuff on their mobile phones without headphones to get out of town by sundown. Or at the very least to stop it. Signs are going up to that effect. Yeehaw! Go get them!
I don’t want to be grumpy Uncle Albert. The public space is just that. It’s communal: I like communal. We share the joys, the mundanity and sometimes the grind of navigating a crowded capital. I don’t use taxis. I know the crush of being sardined on an early morning tube train and exiting smelling a bit like the armpit of the bulky builder I was sandwiched next to. I have had great late nights heading home to the suburbs from central London after an evening out on a jolly, overpopulated, everyone-crushed-together tube train.
