Walking, talking, living cull required

I went to a Michael Bolton concert at the NIA tonight, yesterday as it is now, and have just finished the review. As always he put on a very professional show but I always feel sorry for acts at the NIA. Last time in Brum he was at Symphony Hall which either attracts a different crowd or creates a different atmosphere than the shed like caverns of the bigger arenas so perhaps the time has come when the NEC and NIA should introduce intelligence and bladder control tests before you can buy a ticket.

Go to any concert there and it is always the same. Just look around and amid the forest of arms holding mobile phones taking pictures and videos that will be out of focus and have all the quality of soup stain on a moonless night and you will see a constant stream of people wandering in and out. Now whether they have the attention span or the bladder capacity of a goldfish hardly matters, either way questions should be asked about their suitability for breeding.

Then we have the talkers and texters. The man next to my wife spent the entire concert on his phone either texting his friends, or more likely his carer to let them know where he was, or holding his phone so the other end could hear a song.

And, lucky us, we had a group behind us who seemed to have a congenital need to keep a constant stream of banality coming from their mouths throughout the entire concert presumably to keep each of their solitary brain cells informed they were still alive so it would keep operating the breathing mechanism.

If had wanted to listen to them talk I could have gone round to their house and done it in their front room and not have had to put up with some American geezer singing away and spoiling the conversation so much so that they had to talk even louder whenever he sang.

Not that I would have wanted to go round to their house, mind you, having heard the level of their communication skills - unless I was doing some anthropological study on why evolution seemed to have by-passed certain sections of the population.

Perhaps the answer would be to have a special section, a sound proofed room where all the talkers could be sat where they would annoy no one but each other and if we threw in a few commodes and stuck the fidgets in there as well, everyone one else could be left to enjoy a concert in peace.