Opinion

Anita Robinson: Noise annoys but electronic devices do have an off switch

We're assaulted with noise from birth
We're assaulted with noise from birth We're assaulted with noise from birth

THESE mornings, waking early to light creeping round the edges of the blinds, what reminds me the season has turned is the sound of birdsong.

That is if you can hear it for the steady thrum of rush-hour traffic. I live on a wooded hillside and am treated at breakfast to chirruping, somersaulting finches, scolding tail-coated magpies, plumply grumbling pigeons and cornerboy crows heckling the performance.

But even on my quiet road, noise is encroaching. Maybe it's just age-related, but I'm growing less tolerant of noise. I used to love the 24 hour roar of London. It spelt energy, excitement, pace.

Now it's like one of those thirties avant-garde films about a totalitarian state, with hordes of expressionless automatons pounding the pavements in grim haste to the impatient blare of the sirens and klaxons of teeming, ceaseless traffic.

As a child, I used to cry for the livestock, driven with blows into the double-decked transporters, crammed so closely they couldn't move. With only a terrified eye visible through the slats of the lorry, their piteous squeals and bellows resounded as the overladen vehicle embarked on its long journey by ferry to the UK market or abattoir.

I'm reminded of them now on the London tube at rush-hour, crushed, intimate as a hug with perfect strangers, enduring the bucketing sway of the carriages, the scream of the brakes, the blasts of hot, stale air and the untenable thought, if anything happens, we're a long way down. As if in self-defence, tube passengers armour themselves with electronic distractions. Ears, eyes and fingers fully occupied, they're cocooned, indifferent, unconnected to their fellows.

Commuter trains and buses are full of young men like superannuated schoolboys doing last-minute homework in a discordant chorus of simultaneous beeps, tweedles, logging-on arpeggios and excitable business-types shouting into their mobiles. Wisely on the return journey into their mobiles.Wisely on the return journey I choose the `quiet carriage' where such accessories are forbidden and people read, doze or look out the window.

Young people never look out windows. They're welded to a mobile phone or focused entirely on a portable games console. Spotting something interesting or new on the journey isn't part of their agenda. Eternally texting, tweeting or `chatting' online, when deprived of their tools of communication, they can barely sustain a real conversation.

Lord help our children, assaulted with noise from birth - toys that tinkle, jingle and click, stuffed animals that squeak, bleat and mew, dolls that talk and, abominations of abominations, `activity centres' designed to develop `finer motor skills' that buzz, ping and whirr, creating a racket like a one-man band. We plonk them in front of children's television, hosted at frenetic pace by loudly enthusiastic presenters.

They don't know what silence is, let alone when or where it's appropriate. No wonder Attention Deficit Disorder is growing in schools.

From the eardrum-bursting decibel count of teen music, they graduate as adults to the brain-scrambling curse of the open-plan office and come home to the junk food for the intellect that is most television or browsing the time-eating Internet.

Of course, none of this applies to you Dear Reader. What you put on upon waking is not the television, is it? You don't bring your phone to the breakfast table, check your e-mails while the toast pops, text anyone before 9 am or travel to work with an iPod in your ear or the car radio blaring? Your children aren't unsupervised in their rooms trawling websites, nor do you sit idling flicking television channels till suddenly it’s eleven and the evening’s lost?

No, you, Dear Reader, like myself, live an orderly life full of stimulating conversation, inclusive family projects, healthy exercise and periods of quiet reflection. We're aware (as so few are) that all electronic devices have an ‘off’ switch and we fully appreciate the restorative power and healing balm silence.

Five decades ago, the founder of the Noise Abatement Society declared: "If the general noisy conditions of everyday life continue, we shall become a race of shouting maniacs." The man was a true prophet.