The (modern) Cries of London

Writing in Time Out today India Lawrence fulminates against intrusive TikTok use on London's public transport network. Good for her.

Just last week I found myself in a nightmarish scenario on a virtually empty Overground train. The initial calm was rudely shattered by a man playing videos loudly on his smartphone without earphones. This was promptly added to by a middle-aged woman (certainly old enough to know better) proceeding to do the same, but even louder. The man was Asian and the woman white so there was clearly another agenda at play. 

Her action was a classic demonstration of passive-aggressive behaviour with racist or xenophobic undertones. When another passenger (braver than me) remonstrated with the woman her excuse was that she was trying to drown out the other man. The complainer pointed out that she, or her male companion, might do better to speak to the perpetrator rather than adding to his racket and disturbing the entire train (with the new Overground walk-through rolling stock one cannot even seek tranquility in another carriage). 

Two wrongs don't make a right (or, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous dictum, your freedom to play your video ends where my ears begin) but that concept of basic social politesse was entirely lost on this selfish woman, who obviously felt she occupied the moral highground in this situation. So both culprits continued their noisy competition until they got off the train at the stop before mine. 

Looking back on it I suppose I should have been grateful that my twenty-five minute journey was completed with at least five minutes' relative peace and quiet. These days, that's a luxury. (Suffice to say I started my lunch appointment with a stiff gin and tonic - purely to settle my shattered nerves you understand!) This is but one example from a litany of recent anti-social noise experiences I could (and will) recite... 

Of course, we expect cities to be noisy places, but in London our already stretched tolerance of ambient noise reaches breaking point on an almost daily basis. We don't even have to leave our own homes before some new refinement of sonic torture infiltrates our living space from outside. For example, as if to expand the canon of motorbike, scooter, e-scooter and skateboard noise already besetting us we are now assailed by the distinctive clack-clack-clack of Lime hire bikes being ridden without payment. One can only admire the tenacity of those who do so - the effort required to pedal an unlocked bike must significantly strengthen their calf muscles - while their thoughtlessness further shreds our already frayed nerves. 

Thankfully, at least new electric cars are much quieter than their deisel and petrol predecessors but now other forms of vehicular noise assail us. Leaving aside the regular blaring of car alarms (surely an oxymoron as they don't seem to alarm so much as annoy) we now have the agitated "caution, vehicle turning left" message broadcast indiscriminately by seemingly every other van and lorry at a junction. 

Add to this the distinctive sonar 'ping' of parking cars and the cacophony on our roads is becoming unbearable. Still, at least the craze for car horns blaring out 'La Cucuracha' (oh, how we laughed!) seems to have passed, although their place has been taken by ice cream vans regaling us with 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'. Not much of a swap really.

Perhaps because the new generation of cars no longer emits the classic 'vroom vroom' beloved of boy racer petrol heads, their owners compensate by fitting their vehicles with a gamut of souped-up engine noises, bass rumbles and rapid machine gun-like backfiring the better to disturb the peace. Heaven forfend that any driver should pass through a quiet residential neighbourhood unremarked. Meanwhile, the police, cocooned in their own vehicles and promiscuous in their use of sirens to maximise the disturbance in built-up areas, add to rather than tackle this antisocial behaviour.

It must say something about the disconnect and anonymity of modern life that the only way people feel able to reassure themselves that they actually exist is by making as much noise as possible to assert their presence. And why not when even the most innocuous of domestic appliances emits a medley of rings, pings, bleeps and buzzes? After all, who wants to be upstaged in their own home by the microwave, washing machine or dishwasher?

Another horror of modern urban life is the dreaded leaf-blower, surely the most fiendish yet ultimately ineffectual device ever employed by a public authority in a residential setting since ducking stools and stocks fell out of favour. Being petrol-powered, they also add to air pollution so the news that the Island of Jersey is seeking to ban their use in their public realm was welcome - I hope it succeeds and catches on. (Note to self: check if they fall foul of Mayor Khan's Ulez scheme.)

These monstrosities used only to be employed by councils in the autumn months to clear fallen leaves (or, rather, waft them pointlessly from one spot to another - it all makes work for the working man to do) but are now fetched out, seemingly on a whim and usually on a hot day when our windows are open, to clear grass cuttings and the leaf-shed that happens routinely in summer from street trees stressed by climate change-driven drought.

'The Cries of London', the calls of the capital's itinerant street traders collected in many Regency chapbooks (illustrated pamphlets) included such quaint refrains as "chairs to mend", "who will buy my sweet violets?", "milk below!" and "cherries round and sound". This might strike us as charming today but probably annoyed our Georgian forebears just as much as their modern equivalents do us. At least in those days of horse-drawn vehicles straw was laid on the road outside wealthy households to spare a sick or dying resident any undue disturbance from horses hooves on cobbles. Oh, halcyon days!

Nowadays, when we are supposedly more alert to the damage the omnipresent din and dissonance of modern life can inflict on our mental health and wellbeing, one might have expected the issue to be urgently addressed by legislation before we are all, quite literally, driven to distraction by noise pollution.

But (whisper it) maybe it's already too late?

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