“Excuse me, would you mind turning that down?”

It’s the first day of the first working week of 2009. It’s snowed overnight and the trains are, with depressing reliability, being delayed and cancelled. The queue at the ticket office stretches out onto the road. I’ve overslept, and had time for neither my first cigarette nor my first coffee of the day. When a train finally arrives, it’s groaning under the weight of too many passengers.

My sole asylum on a nightmare morning commute is music. Even when your face is being pushed ever closer to the armpit of the fattest man in the carriage, a good tune can win the battle against rising waves of nausea. It drowns out the woman on the phone who’s desperate to bore everyone around her with the sordid details of “how mashed” she got last night. You can shut your eyes and become oblivious to the young loved-up couple who have obviously just spent the night together and are now whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears. The spoilt, shrieking, attention-seeking child who’s desperate for just one more Chocolate Button might as well not exist.

Except it seems the laws of rail carriage etiquette won’t allow me any sanctuary. To have your music player at a volume that successfully drowns out the rabble will always draw at least a couple of disapproving glances, and as often as not, some self-righteous busy-body will tap you on the shoulder and ask, “can you please turn that down?”

I realise that being forced to listen to the tinny beats blurting out from the headphones of someone nearby on a train can be a little irritating, and I’m entirely in favour of ‘quiet carriages’ on public transport to help those with zero tolerance of personal stereos and mobile phones. But when I’m NOT on a quiet carriage, why is it that Mr Self-Righteous is so willing to ask me to turn down it down, but doesn’t tell the much noisier and more annoying Miss Gossip sitting opposite to shut up? After all, it’s not me who’s making the Chocolate-Button-obsessed kid cry with the graphic and terrifying details of my sex life.

a picture of some poor quality earphones

Admittedly, some of this stems from the cheap, noise-leaking earphones that Apple give away as standard with their ipods. Mr Self-Righteous no doubt tells himself that he’s doing me a favour by getting me to turn my music down, as he’ll be saving me from tinnitus in middle-age. But the truth is that even with the best hearing in the world, you often need an ipod turned up to near maximum to hear anything over the rumbling of a tube train, so useless is the noise-proofing in their earphones.

Okay, I could just buy better earphones, but that’s not really the point. The quiet ‘bum-bum-tish’ of my music gets treated like it’s the sole cause of all Monday morning commuter misery, when really it should rate pretty low on the bothersome-ness scale. And if I could, I’d happily read a newspaper in absolute silence, except that cramped conditions and an inability to fully open my eyes for the first hour after waking make it impossible. So can’t we learn to live and let live? If I can resist telling Mr Self-Righteous that his smug, self-satisfied face is a massive nuisance to my eyes, won’t he learn to tolerate the mild irritation I’m causing to his ears?