I only wanted a croissant.
Unfortunately, access to the pastry cabinet was being controlled by a man holding a full-volume business meeting on FaceTime.
“No, Gav,” he announced to the entire café. “That isn’t what we agreed.”
Nobody knew what Gav had agreed. Nobody cared. Gav could have resigned, liquidated the company and fled to Belize, and I would still have been primarily concerned with getting past this irritating man’s elbow and reaching the pain au chocolat.
But there he stood: phone held aloft, one wireless earbud inexplicably in his left ear and Gav’s disembodied forehead filling the screen. The meeting involved targets. It involved a revised document. It involved somebody called Sophie who, we learned, had “failed to take ownership”.
It did not, at any stage, involve moving six inches to the left so that another human being could buy a pastry.
I tried the polite lean. Then the small apologetic cough women perform before requesting access to a space they are already entitled to occupy. Eventually I said, “Excuse me,” with the brittle brightness of a person whose next communication may be conducted through solicitors.
He looked at me as though I had interrupted an organ transplant.
“Sorry, mate,” he told Gav. “It’s really noisy in here.”
And this, I think, is where civilisation began to fail.
We have somehow reached a point at which whatever is happening on one person’s device automatically becomes a communal experience.
Your meeting is our meeting. Your argument is our argument. Your child’s cartoon is the restaurant’s entertainment. Your TikTok algorithm is now the soundtrack to the 08:12 from Stockport.
Nobody asks. Nobody even appears to notice.
People used to leave a room to take a telephone call. Now they activate the loudspeaker in the middle of a café and hold the phone horizontally beneath their chin, like a small electronic tray.
This posture is particularly popular with people discussing intensely private medical matters and men who begin every call by saying, “You’re on speaker, by the way,” only after the other person has already revealed something catastrophic about Kevin.
There is always a Kevin.
Then there are the video callers who wander through supermarkets broadcasting both ends of a domestic crisis. You will be quietly comparing the price of washing powder when a woman beside you shouts, “Turn the camera round. No, THE OTHER WAY,” and suddenly we are all inspecting a stranger’s damp patch in Marbella.
On trains, adolescents watch rapid-fire videos at a volume designed to dislodge dental work. Adults conduct disciplinary meetings from the Quiet Coach. A man in a gilet dictates voice notes while walking directly into people, because looking where you are going is apparently incompatible with thought leadership.
Meanwhile, parents in restaurants place a tablet in front of little Harrison and allow a brightly coloured pig to scream through dinner. I don’t blame Harrison. Harrison is four. Harrison has no purchasing power and did not select the data plan.
But Harrison’s parents will stare peacefully into the middle distance while every other table learns the entire song about putting your shoes on.
Headphones were invented in 1910. We have given you more than a century to familiarise yourself with them.
The Bluetooth speaker has made all of this worse.
It is an object whose principal purpose seems to be allowing one person to impose their musical taste upon everyone within half a mile.
You find them on beaches, where a family has erected a windbreak, opened a cool box and appointed themselves entertainment director for the entire coastline. You find them beside lakes and on walking trails, because nothing complements birdsong and the movement of wind through grass like Calvin Harris arriving from a rucksack.
Occasionally the speaker is being carried by a cyclist. Nobody can hear the music properly, including the cyclist, but every pedestrian receives eight seconds of aggressive bass followed by an announcement about battery life.
At some point we accepted the baffling proposition that listening to music aloud in public is an expression of personality. It is not. It is an ill-advised administrative decision you have made on behalf of strangers.
Your summer playlist is not public infrastructure.
And no, playing Fleetwood Mac does not make it acceptable. Northern Auntie likes Fleetwood Mac. Northern Auntie has also spent enough time around recently divorced men with expensive speakers to know that The Chain is not a personality.
All of which brings us to the garden cinema.
It began, like so many antisocial developments, on Instagram.
Someone arranged two tasteful blankets, a string of festoon lights and a portable projector in front of a white sheet. There was popcorn in little striped cartons. Everyone wore knitwear in complementary shades of oatmeal. The caption said: “Making memories with my favourites.”
It looked lovely.
Within eighteen months, a man called Dean had purchased a 14-foot inflatable screen, surround sound and a weatherproof projector capable of transmitting The Greatest Showman across six neighbouring postcodes.
Dean does not watch films indoors anymore. Indoors is for people who have failed to monetise their patio.
At 9.45pm on a warm Saturday, his garden becomes an open-air multiplex. There are beanbags. There is Prosecco. There is one guest who keeps saying, “This is better than being abroad.”
It is not better than being abroad for the woman next door, who has closed every window in the house and can still hear Hugh Jackman discovering self-belief through a privet hedge.
The garden cinema owner believes the neighbours will not mind because the film is “family-friendly”. This misunderstands the nature of sound. Noise does not become quieter because the BBFC has approved it.
Nor are the neighbours reassured by being warned in advance.
“Just to let everyone know, we’re having a little movie night on Saturday!” writes Dean in the residents’ WhatsApp group, accompanied by a popcorn emoji.
This is not consultation. It is a hostage note with punctuation.
Nobody wants to be the miserable neighbour. That is how the garden cinema succeeds. We all sit indoors, furious and perspiring, while insisting to our partners that it will probably finish soon.
It never finishes soon. First there is the film. Then there is the playlist. Then there is a lengthy garden debrief about whether the book was better.
At midnight somebody discovers the hot tub.
For clarity, Northern Auntie is not demanding silence.
Silence can be unnerving. Silence is what happens in a cul-de-sac after somebody has put a strongly worded note through every door.
Ordinary human noise is one of the pleasures of living near other people. Children playing. A neighbour laughing. Somebody cutting the grass. A barbecue becoming cheerfully disorganised. A radio through an open kitchen window. Friends staying longer than intended because the evening is warm and nobody wants to go home.
We should tolerate one another’s lives. More than tolerate them, really. The sounds coming through the fence are often proof that we belong somewhere - that beyond our own walls are people growing up, falling in love, burning sausages and getting the paddling pool out too early.
But there is a difference between the unavoidable noise of people living and the amplified noise of somebody deciding that their chosen content outranks everybody else’s peace.
One is community. The other is a content strategy.
The same distinction applies in public. Nobody expects a café to resemble a monastery. Conversation, crockery, babies, coffee machines and friends shrieking because they haven’t seen one another since Tuesday are all part of the room.
But your quarterly sales meeting is not part of the room.
Neither is your cousin’s FaceTime tour of her hotel bathroom. Neither is a 40-second clip of a man pressure-washing a driveway, played six times while you read the comments.
The problem is not volume alone. It is the disappearance of the tiny imaginative act that makes shared life possible: noticing that other people are present.
Back in the café, the meeting continued.
Sophie’s failure to take ownership was becoming serious. Gav attempted a defence, but the phone was briefly angled towards a basket of sourdough and his contribution became muffled.
I secured the pastry.
As I left, the man was saying, “Let’s take this offline.”
I nearly went back.
Offline? We had all been dragged online with you. The barista knew the figures. A retired couple by the window knew about Sophie. A toddler licking the sugar packets could probably have prepared the revised document.
So please: take the call outside. Put an earbud in both ears. Lower the speaker. Move away from the pastry cabinet. Allow Gav the dignity of being professionally disappointed in private.
And enjoy your garden cinema. Invite your friends. Make popcorn. Sit beneath the stars and congratulate yourself on creating memories.
Just turn it down.
Your neighbours did not buy tickets. They cannot pause you. And some of us would like one quiet evening without hearing Pierce Brosnan attempt an ABBA song through the hydrangeas.
Also, Gav still hasn’t sent the revised figures.
I know because the entire café heard about it.
