Appropriately, I was eating a Happy Meal when I heard the whistling.
Defying all modern trends, a man of some vintage was whistling a song.
It was the Stevie Wonder hit I Just Called To Say I Love You and he whistled the entire thing, beginning to end, including the little dum-dum-dum bit at the end that’s usually handled by a cheap keyboard in a backstreet bar.
I thought it was glorious and I enjoyed every perfectly-toned note but the distinguished fast-food employee had but a single fan. His young colleagues hated him with the fire of a million suns, judging by the looks they were giving him as he pointlessly wiped surfaces with a worrying cloth and expressed the joy of his work in a traditional way.
Whistling is dying out. A 2015 survey by YouGov – also pointless, although interesting – found 70% of people believed whistling had declined over the previous 20 years. I read about it in a London-based newspaper that was taking a rare break from attacking refugees, so it must be true.
The same report mainly attributed the loss of whistling to the disappearance of jobs like errand boys, although I’m more inclined to believe its secondary reason is the popularity of iPods. Who needs to whistle when they have bangin’ tunes in their earbuds?
The newsroom that produces this newspaper once had and possibly still has, a phantom whistler.
Somewhere in the crowd of people producing The Courier, Tele and Sunday Post, someone would provide anonymous music to accompany the journalism. Many of us hated it but we could never track the perpetrator.
Now, weirdly, I miss it. As a person guilty of excessive nostalgia, I find it upsetting that new generations may never hear such personalised, laid-back creativity, or even learn the skill themselves.
As the traffic builds around us and the pace of life increases, simple pleasures are drowned out. They can only be saved if we choose to save them. So I have resolved to teach my children to whistle and to do it more.
And if the Phantom Whistler of the Newsroom is reading this, I call upon them to strike again.