… SO MUCH NOISE !
What is it with motorcyclists? I mean I get the need for the speed bit, the leap of the machine beneath you at the twist of the wrist, the wondrous gyroscopic adrenaline of the tight turn. But what’s with the noise? It’s not as if the motorcyclist even hears it himself. The noise spools out behind him as a lon whining snail trail, a deranged sound map of his journey across hill and dale, imposed on every poor sod who has the misfortune to live within aural range of a road.
And who amongst us does that exclude? Recent studies have shown that noise pollution negatively affects more than two thirds of the population on a regular basis. If it’s not trains and boats and planes then it’s trucks, cars, heavy machinery, music (yes, music) television, radio, you name it.
In this regard I have undertaken my own rigorous and scientific study, including extensive polling of a select audience, to determine the three most annoying sounds of the modern age, placing them in order of perniciousness. It was, let me tell you, a hard job to whittl it down.
To begin with there are those noises emanating from what we tend to call the loathsome leisure toys: jetskis, children’s dirt bikes, ultra-lights (for the uninitiated these are hang-gliders with engines attached that, for no logical reason, lack a muffler), a category into which we might also insert the various devices for dealing with grass and trees: whippersnippers, chainsaws, lawnmowers, hedge- clippers, except that these at least have the benefit of a certain sort of necessity, whereas the former are simply torture for everyone who is not actually using them, a situation made even worse by the suspicion that they might actually be fun…
But I need to draw a distinction here: I’m not discussing noises that are excruciating, like fingernails on blackboards, or metal on crockery, screaming babies, sounds that have a sharp visceral effect on the nervous system. What I’m talking about are noises that represent an infringement of personal space.
There were several candidates for third position: loud music in public venues vied for a place, (a whole category in itself really: clothes’ shops, restaurants, supermarkets, lifts, public toilets) but so also did the noise that tells you the driver’s door is open, the beeping of bar-code readers, the inanity of someone else’s headphones turned up too loud. Eventually, though, we narrowed it down: Number three is the mobile phone. Just the prevalence of them, the irritation of the creative ring-tone, the cliché of the conversation: ‘I’m on the train.’
Number two was easy; there was no question: It is the bleating of trucks, heavy machinery and forklifts when in reverse. Who, one wonders, thought up that one? We know it’s going backwards. Again. Enough already. Was there ever a more demented noise?
Well, yes, in fact, there is: because of course there’s still one more, one worse, one more heinous. I’ve given a deal of thought as to why number one is so obnoxious, why this particular activity should rate as the most noisome, should achieve the pinnacle of aural annoyance: there has been, however, one weeps to admit, far too many opportunities for this sort of contemplation, and it was during one of these moments that I realised it must win the award simply because of the innate uselessness of the activity being undertaken. I refer, of course, to the leaf- blower.
You know that while you are being assaulted by its mindless roar that there is, paradoxically, a mind attached to it, but that it is one caught up in a cycle of extraordinary tediousness, a mind given over to a fit of almost bureaucratic neatness, of virgoan pusillanimity combined with awe-inspiring arrogance, a mind that fails to recognise the anomaly in applying excessive force to the removal of a leaf. Ah yes, human ingenuity.
Do I give the impression of longing for some sort of pre industrial silence? A golden age before the invention of the internal combustion engine? Let me count the ways. Some of us are looking forward to the arrival of peak oil.
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