Being a mere plebian designer, my literary intake is generally confined to the sport pages of the local rag, however on this occasion I’d like to share with you a recent journey I had into Dante’s Inferno.

For the uninitated this term is derived from ‘The Divine Comedy‘, which is an allegory telling of the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell, guided by the Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, hell is depicted as 9 Circles of suffering located within the earth, each one becoming more horrific than the last. The first, uppermost levels contain the sinners who haven’t really been that bad at all, the unvirtous, the cheats, the greedy and so forth. Continuing further into the bowels, each Circle becomes more gruesome until you reach the final levels containing the scum of humanity; the murderers, rapists, politicians and so forth. So far, so good, then.

However, thanks to Northern Rail’s 17.27 Blackpool North service last night, I believe I may have inadvertently stumbled upon another, concluding circle, possibly overlooked by Dante in his haste to escape the Beast himself. It appears to be reserved to those members of society who have no sense of social grace, manners or intelligence; the People Who Play Music Through Their Mobile Phones (In Public).

Now I’m not being overly harsh here, and normally I and the other travellers would have exacted swift and decisive retribution on the offender but they were almost certainly saved by the fact of having hilariously bad musical taste. For twenty minutes we were most certainly on a ragga tip; assorted drum n bass /RnB numbers being bandied around until, and almost with comedic effect, the shuffle function on Mrs Boombastic’s Nokia kicked in and segued beautifully into ‘Hungry Eyes’ from classic 80’s movie ‘Dirty Dancing’. Normal people would have been horrified by this and quickly fumbled to turn their phone off, down or seek out something less embarrassing from their playlist (Rolf Harris, for instance) but no, our intrepid DJ then decided to treat the whole carriage to her own interpretation of Eric Carmen’s classic in X-Factor (I’ll give you 2 out of 10) fashion.

At this point, reader, you probably think I’m making this up. Well I’m not. I swear there were people dancing in the aisle and the conductor even invited a nice old lady from Chorley up for a quick Tango in the Night. It was almost magical, so much so that as I remarked to a fellow passenger upon disembarking, it was very nearly enough to make me want to stay on till Blackpool.

Well, almost.

Tags: dirty dancing, mobile phone, music, Northern Rail, public

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 7:29 AM and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.