A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Fully prepared to let the train take the strain on a recent day-out to Dublin, I’d made allowances for the vagaries of Wi-Fi as you meander through the Midlands, by downloading the opening few episodes of the new series of the brilliant Slow Horses to pass the time.

I needn’t have bothered – because while Mick Heron knows how to write fine drama, he couldn’t hold a candle to real life version as ‘enjoyed’ by all for free on the evening Dublin-to-Galway train.

The train itself was perfect; one of the newer ones with electronic chargers for every seat. No snack trolley of course, even though it transpired that more than one of the passengers could badly have used copious amounts of coffee.

Anyway, we settled down for the journey home, earbuds in position, iPad primed to go and all things right before even pulling out of Heuston.

But the catch-up clips from the last series hadn’t finished as we cruised out through Islandbridge when the slurred shouting started in the next bank of seats.

A man and woman with a ten or twelve-year-old son were roaring at each other – all three of them, all at the same time – at a volume that superseded all of the technical advances housed in those noise-cancelling earbuds.

I had my back to it but the man across the table from me could see it all and decided to provide a form of commentary for those of us facing in the wrong direction; the ones who only had the sound but no vision.

He didn’t know their names, so he loudly and regularly referred to them collectively by a pejorative term. Luckily for him, they were shouting so loudly at each other that they didn’t seem to hear him.

Slaps were exchanged – between the feuding family, not the commentator – until Big Daddy took himself off to the toilet, and on his return, sat in a completely different seat.

He soon dozed off and the rest of the carriage breathed a collective sigh of relief, although Mammy still had things to say even if nobody knew what they were because of the distortion caused by her earlier imbibing.