Hoist by their own petard

It was a Sunday evening. I’d played a gig in the afternoon at my favourite venue; the band was ‘cooking’ and the audience was loving it. Altogether it was an excellent afternoon. As is our habit, we’d taken the ‘gear’ home and were ready for a quiet drink before a rustica from our local pizzeria.

It was early evening so the pub was relatively empty. However there was a fly in the ointment or to be more accurate three flies in the ointment. Sitting quite close to us were three men in their 70s discussing music, whilst one was finding tracks on his phone and playing them quite loudly. As well as this the pub had on the regulation mindless music which has a vigorous bass line and little else. These two rival soundtracks were totally incompatible and created the last thing that I wanted - audio chaos. I tried the ‘casual critical glance’ towards them but to no avail. In fact, it had the opposite effect as the ‘keeper of the grooves’ now aware of my disapproval took this as a challenge and balanced the phone on the top of some empty glasses thus doubling the volume and trebling the irritation.

Now I’m not a great one for confrontation so we carried on talking, trying to turn a deaf ear to the musical chaos in the background. After a few minutes, which entailed lip reading on our table, I realised that the level of noise was dropping. I smiled to myself as I realised that the increased volume which was intended to increase our level of aggravation, had reached a point whether the ‘three amigos’ were also tiring of the cacophony. And so peace was resumed, we relaxed and that phrase which I had not heard for some time came to mind. ‘Hoist by their own petard.’ Thanks, Bill.