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Do you like playing music on public transport without headphones? Then I despise you

10 14
29.08.2025

The world is divided. The country is divided. Communities are divided. Even families are divided.

But there’s one thing which unites us all whether we’re a Faragist or a Yesser, MAGA or Antifa, prude or libertine. And it’s this: the demons in human form who play music from their phones on public transport need strung up by the indescribables.

Even Putin and Zelensky could agree on this. If there’s one type on the face of the planet who nobody can stand - and who everyone wants to deliver a fatal malkie - it’s this creature.

Social taxonomists have various classifications for this subdivision of humanity: including blasterbater and headphone-dodger.

Finding yourself adjacent to such a specimen is to find yourself in the company of a hagfish. They sit on buses and trains playing music - inevitably the most woeful of tunes - or video clips.

Read more from Neil

They could easily wear headphones. But they don’t. Because they’re soulless oafs. They turn the dial up to 11. They can be both male and female, though the male of the species seems to dominate.

They breathe mostly through their mouths. Class is no boundary, and nor, increasingly, is age. The blasterbater is not a product of socio-economics but of what could be termed ‘sheer unbridled dickishness’.

A blasterbater is self-made. They aren’t nurtured by parents, warped by trauma or life experience. One must want to be a blasterbater.

The seed is a character so bereft of fellow-feeling that they would most likely play techno on their iPhone at their own granny’s funeral.

Nor is their evil confined to merely blaring crap music or terrible comedy clips of Ricky Gervais insulting disabled people.

The more monied of the species will........

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