It’s mid-morning. You’re sitting on the waterfront, looking out over the water, the slight morning breeze wafting through your hair and sending a slight chill over your skin. Not uncomfortably so, just enough for you to feel the wind’s caresses and appreciate the sunshine when it does hit you all the more.

You can hear the water sploshing against the wall down below as it sloshes back and forth, back and forth, never still, always moving. You don’t look into it too deeply as it’s almost opaque with green crap and the filth from a million motorboats passing through the area, but right now it doesn’t matter because this is your moment. You are, for once, at peace.

Then, a sound from over yonder. You can’t quite make out what it is. It’s quite harsh, and tinny, and… sounds a bit like Dizzee Rascal.

It is Dizzee Rascal. But a version of Dizzee Rascal that appears to be completely devoid of bass, just masses and masses of treble, so much so that the sound of the whole track is lost in a wash of what sounds awfully like white noise with a babbling idiot on top of it.

You frown at the tracksuit-clad young gentleman as we wanders past you with a similarly-attired companion. The sound seems to be coming from his pocket, and the two are talking and smoking. You frown a little harder, willing a pair of psychic daggers to fly out of your eyes and embed themselves firmly in the two boys’ colons. Sadly, the sharp implements do not manifest themselves so you are reduced to making a distinctly middle-class tutting noise.

One of the boys turns around and gives you a sneer that seems to say “fahk off mush, you is such a neek init lol”. You counter with a raised eyebrow which seems to say “I’m sorry. I don’t understand your illiterate juvenilia. Kindly return from whence you came. And throw that noise-making monstrosity into the Solent while you’re about it, you bally young scamp!”

The moment passed, the two boys wander into the distance, muttering something about “fahkin’ neeks”. Your little mental haven of calm shattered, you reluctantly get up and head for the ice-cream parlour in an attempt to drown your sorrows in a wash of soft ice-cream and crumbly chocolate.

Then you go home and cry.

Oh, why do people persist in doing this? Other than to annoy people like me, of course. There is no reason on God’s green Earth for mobile phone speakers to exist. With GPS technology being what it is now, if your phone detects that you are outside, you should not be allowed to use its speakers.

I’m not just saying this to be a miserable bastard, though that is of course a big part of it. I’m saying this to encourage people to give music the respect it deserves. I hate Dizzee Rascal, shitty hip-hop and whiney R&B singers, but those artists spend a lot of time and money producing their work, so to completely remove any degree of production from the track by playing it through a 0.5 watt speaker roughly the size of one of your pubes seems rather… disrespectful, somehow.

And have you noticed that no-one is ever playing good music through their phone speakers? I’d still feel the same if I heard someone blasting some Maiden through their phone – that shit need to be loud, yo – but it’d be nice to hear something that isn’t just for pasty white tracksuit-wearers to pretend that they’re badass black gangstas from the hood to.

The cream of this, of course, is when said pasty white tracksuit-wearers decide that it’s time for them to start their own rapping career and feel that a mobile phone provides an appropriate amount of rhythmic “oomph” to put behind their sorry attempts at rocking some rhymes. Sorry, buster, but you just look like a twat babbling crap in front of your pyjama-clad friends.