Your mobile Djing is not going down well

Finally, an environment where staring at a screen isn’t deemed problematic. The smartphone has been a godsend for the bored traveller, and can provide limitless entertainment on an otherwise tedious coach trip from Reading to Haverfordwest. The issue here, of course, is noise.

For people who are even mildly sensitive to such things, the lack of self-awareness displayed by people making smartphonerelated noise is astonishing to behold. The 40-something man watching football on the train. The woman watching Brazilian soap operas on the bus. Kids playing music, loudly. The grandparent having a Facetime chat with a relative. The woman watching a Trevor Noah monologue on Youtube at full volume on a flight to Berlin. Bafflingly, none of these people seem aware of the existence of headphones, comparatively cheap devices which would make everyone within earshot a great deal happier.

When it comes to voice calls, there’s a widely held belief that shouting louder into your smartphone will somehow make your voice louder at the other end, something which wasn’t true in Alexander Graham Bell’s day and still isn’t today. Air travel has largely been spared this menace, but at the end of last year the European Commission announced that they were ‘paving the way for the widespread deployment of 5G services’ on aircraft, including voice calls. A technological triumph, perhaps – but when a similar relaxation of rules was proposed in the US, many cabin crew and passengers were incensed. Not for safety reasons, but for sanity ones: because we don’t want to hear a stranger loudly describing their medical symptoms to their GP.

Back on the ground, this can happen in the most unexpected of places. One fellow journalist recalls: ‘We caught a water taxi to the airport in Venice. Just as we were setting off, a fellow passenger rang her therapist and began a session, talking about her highly personal problems at the top of her voice. An hour of it. Quite extraordinary.’