The week I’m writing this, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has clarified that local authorities have the power to enforce fines on public transport users for playing content outloud (without headphones). These fines could be up to £100 and how they are enforced would be up to the service provider. Many seem to have called for harsher measures, suggesting that antisocial behaviour like this could be a real deterrent to people using public transport and rthat the government should have a sterner hand in preventing it.
Weirdly, these fines made me think of a moment from a recent cross-country train ride. I’d set myself up in a four seat grouping, with a small table bisecting. From here I thought that I could do some work, read my book or just comfortably stretch out and relax. I’m the type of person who takes their shoes off on any journey longer than an hour. Mostly for comfort, but also to allow myself to stretch out easier, letting my limbs extend and release the tension of an active lifestyle, one that has me on my feet, crouching, reaching and lifting for long stretches of the day.
On the other side of the aisle sat a family of four, two young children (I’d guess under the age of 10) and two (externally) conventional parents. They’d been traveling from Scotland and spent most of their day on trains, making the long journey to visit family. The two children were bored. Having perhaps exhausted their time (or charge) with their iPad’s and sat still/ quiet for long hours, both of them were desperate for some interaction. After an attempt to engage them in competitive video games with Dad, both children had been told to sit still and quiet, their Dad reading his book from his own iPad with an uneasy tension drawn on his face (he looked like he wanted to seem very professional, perhaps he was) and their Mum was to keep them entertained. They were loud, giggling and shouting, to draw their fathers attention away from his own screen and onto them.
I don’t want to condemn the parents, there is already too much discourse around ‘iPad babies’ and judgement leveled at parents who allow their children access to technology at a young age. It’s just not my place to judge, or anyone’s really. Parenting is difficult and how people cope and manage with the daily stresses of raising people, isn’t for me to comment on. I have my own opinions on the choices I would like to make, but the judgement feels unfair and condescending. Instead I want to talk about the societal pressures that lead to this.
Unable to focus on my book, I had the thought “what if I just read it outloud to them?”. While I could be wrong, the children seemed desperate for some intentional engagement (as someone who would describe themselves as a professional at seeking attention, I feel I can often see the signs). I remembered the times that my father would try to entertain me by engaging me in a story, either something made up on the spot or just whatever book he was attempting to read when I was bored and seeking attention. Often these were fairly mediocre crime drama’s, spy stories or other hero fantasy narratives (he had a particular love of Robert Ludlum Bourne Trilogy), but otherwise were stories involving myself and/ or close friends off on some adventure. While these memories are fairly brittle, they are something I look back on with warmth and comfort.
Now this could be ‘optimised’ with audio books (something that eventually happened with my own tales once I was old enough to operate a portable record player), but it isn’t the same warmth as one gets from sharing the space and presence of the storyteller. This form of shared experience nurtures our understanding that people (and not things) hold lessons and stories worth hearing.
I often think about this in relation to music. While I settle for recorded music, it doesn’t hold my heart in the same way as something played live and in conversation with its audience. Even the most straightforward performance, including backing tracks and choreographed moments, plays somewhat with the emotional and physical presence of an audience. Beyond the parasocial and direct sharing of time and presence with an artist, this mutual act of feeling together, brings together moments of community in a way that little else can. Seeing Alabaster Deplume’s recent performance at the ICA, his open and direct acknowledgement of this bond earnestly clarifies what’s special about this form of sharing. “I wouldn’t be playing this without you”. And vice-versa, I wouldn’t be here, in this moment or with these people, feeling these feelings, without him.
Thinking around how I could possibly engage this scenario and offer to read something to these children as a way to take the strain off the parents and share a particularly beautiful story that I was engulfed in. I eventually decided, it may be more stressful on the family and decided against it. Talking to strangers on public transport is a gamble. Sometimes the connections can feel healing and sometimes they can be frightening. In and around the South of England, it’s a good rule of thumb that most people will find it frightening and sometimes it’s worth giving people their peace. This saddens me, but I’ve come to expect and account for it. Community with strangers is something that often uplifts my faith in others. It’s something I think is vital for spiritual fulfillment, but is underprovisioned and, as Simone Weil asserts, we are malnourished in our need for roots and community.
Acts of community can come in many forms. Often under represented is the care involved in communicating a need or preference. It’s something I struggle with myself and leaves me feeling vulnerable and afraid that it will be met with hostility, judgement or indifference. Friends referenced the idea that the only people who are willing to challenge others on their behaviour on public transport are “conservatives”, but I believe this doesn’t account for the many people who find alternative and less condescending ways engaging with people acting anti-socially.
A few years ago, a group of men began harassing me and some friends on a train at New Years, shouting homophobic and transphobic abuse, threatening us and trying to physically scare us. Out of a packed train of onlookers, one woman stepped up to support and challenge their behavior. While it likely did little to change anything within our attackers, that social support protected us and massively affected our experience. No police came, no security came and very little of the community around us saw it as their responsibility to step in, but she did, and it renewed my faith in our capacity (and responsibility) to love and care for strangers. But defending someone isn’t the only time we should push past social conventions to engage strangers. Sometimes, it can be to challenge or engage with their behaviour, with the aim to have an impact (no matter how little) on how they move forward in the world.
We have a responsibility of care to those we do not like or agree with as they are part of our community too. Community with people we like and agree with is easy, there is less conflict, less tension and thereby, it’s easier to enter into contracts of care with them. With those we disagree with it’s less so. I sometimes find myself thinking about this in response to the ‘chosen family’ that is a popular talking point within queer communities. My understanding is that it came as a response to families that forbade or cast out their queer children, forcing them to find and rely on other familial relationships, though recently I’ve heard it also used in response to people who hold tensions with their existing family (political, social, etc) and have come to rely on care outside those systems. I don’t mean to critique its necessity, but it sometimes worries me how people can discard genelogical familial systems due to the sheer tension of it. This goes for me two, as both an adult and a teenager, I’ve gone through long periods of cutting contact with family members due to the pain and difficulty associated with being in contact with them. The contact hurt but it’s taken me years to also realise how much I hurt myself with those actions too. Burning the bridge goes both ways.
Coming back to this example of someone playing audio outloud on a bus. I think it can be an extension of connection and vulnerability to ask them to stop, or explain that it is disrupting. Fine it’s hard and puts you at risk of harassment by those very same people, but there are ways of navigating it more sensitively and what’s the alternative? Call the police (or security) on a group of teenage boys, so that they can tell them off instead (or better let someone else do it for you)? Is it really worth us outsourcing social education to mediums of policing and punishment? That isn’t the society I wish to uphold. I think we can do better, not just in holding each other socially responsible but also in accepting the differences present in how others see a space. Besides, do we really think any of these measures will be enforced fairly or without intersecting with other forms of discrimination?
The best case scenario for this legislation is that people sit, headphones on, and spend more time absorbed into their devices, another social tragedy. An example I was given supporting the legislation is people sitting and watching Andrew Tate (or other right wing content) on the bus, but is it better for this to happen in a vacuum? Are we not seeing the result of how this vacuum refuses to hold through these methods of repression and isolation? Surely these ideas meeting people in public spaces and being challenged, with love and compassion, holds more potential in changing the world than an encouragement towards being alone, with one’s device, on a crowded bus.
26.10.2026 - talking in public
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