If I were queen for a day, every city would have to spend one hour in utter silence: no music in shops and restaurants, no honking of horns, no conversations on mobile phones. Only birds would be allowed to sing.
These days there is barely anywhere in the British Isles where the dawn chorus can be recorded without some extraneous noise spoiling it. It is as if we cannot live without noise. I have friends who, as soon as they get in a car, must switch on the radio or their iPod. As soon as they enter a house on goes the television, and whenever I have visitors the TV spends hours talking to itself.
Worse is the assumption that nobody can do anything without some wretched noise to help them. The modern notion of background music is a loud thump, thump, thump. It isn’t only conversation it kills but also concentration. I have lost count of the times that, after numerous “sorrys?” and “can’t hears”, conversation over what was supposed to be a pleasant meal has just petered out.
Music, or what passes for it, is everywhere. You must buy everything from whisky to tights to the racket of caterwauling in the background, or rather the foreground; and in those places where it is reasonable to expect to find music the point is emphasised by turning up the volume. I have bought DVDs in Virgin Megastore wearing builder’s earmuffs but still able to hear the darn din.
I went to see Hairspray and endured the entire performance with my fingers in my ears. “But it’s a musical,” was the surprised response from many to whom I mentioned this. Since when was a musical synonymous with an assault on the eardrums?
So ubiquitous is the inability to go about one’s business without din that people now walk along pavements with devices connected to earphones, engrossed in everything except where they are going. Occasionally they take the leads out of their ears and replace them with rectangles into which they shout about their private affairs and marital disagreements.
When not shouting they slurp coffee which they have bought “to go”.
I am old enough to remember the days when if you asked a shop assistant for something to go you would have been in Boots buying syrup of figs. But then those were also the days when tablets were medicinal remedies and the net was for catching fish.
Car horns were invented to warn other drivers of your presence, not to express displeasure or greetings. If I were queen then all those who honked in fury would be shut up in a cell and themselves honked at for hours – probably a pointless punishment as they’d doubtless think the bedlam some new form of pop music. So in Widdecombe’s kingdom everybody would have to listen to nothing at all for a whole hour. I moved 200 miles from London to do just that.
