During an early morning bus ride recently I felt rather good. Which is unusual for me on buses. It was spring, not too packed, the bus came on time, the sky was a delicious light and sunny cerulean, the blossom on passing trees especially beautiful.
It was, as PG Wodehouse would say, one of those happy mornings.
Then, somewhere behind me, a kid switched on one of those mobile phones with a radio on it. A painfully-tinny, musically-impoverished, moronically percussive chick-a-boom noise filled the top deck.
It turns out that these musical gadgets, products of the satanic side of capitalism, are causing low morale all across London.
Tom Wright and Valeria Martinelli recently presented a petition, signed by 4,500 bus users, to Transport for London (TfL), calling for the outlawing of music on buses. TfL responded by implementing a poster campaign.
What have posters ever done for us? Okay, you’ve got Toulouse-Lautrec, old film posters, and the counter-cultural Art Nouveau of the 1960s. What I mean is, what have posters ever stopped us doing?
If posters stopped us smoking then all those posters for the last 40-odd years showing the horrors of smoking-related diseases would have finished the habit off.
Instead, in 2006, there were 12 million adults smoking cigarettes in Britain. Not to mention children.
Lately there has been a fortune blown on anti-binge drinking poster campaigns. I smile wryly at these as I walk across the vomit, blood and broken glass of south London on weekend nights.
TfL’s poster campaign won’t work either. The posters ask for respect to be given to other people. That’s funny, because the people who use these gadgets are the same people who are obsessed with getting respect and who are the very last people to give it.
Poster campaigns are the sop that supine and incompetent authorities use to pacify the civilised and give journalists something positive to write about.
Only when the playing of music on public transport becomes a legal offence, as smoking is, will we be free of this rubbish.