Sunday 20 October 2013

What a noisy world we live in!

I should qualify that - here in the UK, even in a market town, silence is rare, and precious. Even if the traffic is quiet, there is wind in the trees, the occasional dog, the radiators ticking, someone passing my house and running her stick along the railings. Mothers dragging their children to school. The slam of car doors. The drone of a passing plane (especially irritating if it's a microlight). Petrol lawn mowers.

Some - such as the passing police car or fisticuffs from lads coming home from the pub - I could live without.

But others can interrupt me any time and I'll stop to listen and smile:

Children playing. I can hear the children at the nearest school if I stop and listen when they are out to play. The cries and laughters from children's playgrounds are the same the world over. I remember waking one morning in Laos to the same joyful cries - and felt both a twinge of homesickness and delight at being where I could hear Laotian children all at the same time.

The mistle thrush that wakes me in the summer as the sun rises. I'm not good in the mornings but always I forgive this little bird. Many times - when I've been in 'less developed countries' (I don't like the term but you know what I mean) - I've been woken by cockerels. I have mixed feelings about cockerels. By the time they're crowing many local people are up and about, women in the fields and men ... too often the men are playing cards, but sometimes they're doing useful things with machinery. But the point is that local people are already into the day while this lazy tourist is still abed. The cockerel rebukes me. But, at home, my mistle thrush sings me back to sleep.

Music (almost all music. There's some very modern classical music that I struggle with.) Music does wonderful things in my head, and I'm not sure I can put it into words. Some makes me tap my feet, or swing my shoulders - and I'm not even aware I'm doing it. Some makes me join in a sing, in spite of myself. And some will make me cry - though I've no idea why. But somehow it reaches parts of my brain that are nothing to do with thinking, and that makes me feel wonderful!

Some accents - a strange one, this. I've no idea why some accents whine like musical saws (you know the kind - they appeared in music halls and are so screechy you want, briefly, to hide till they stop talking) while others are compelling. Last weekend, the waiter with his French, 'Voila' was enough for me to know I'd listen to him to reading the phone book. Tom Conti (do you remember him?) - I could listen to him reciting anything, listening to the music of his voice and paying no attention to the content. I read somewhere that the language of Dante was taken as the national language of Italy when the country united in 1848 because it was the most beautiful of the dialects available - and I get that, for I can listen to it without caring I don't understand a word.

And soon I'll be bombarded by new sounds. Cuban Spanish, Cuban children, Cuban birds, Cuban music ...

What sounds make you stop, listen, be glad you woke up today?

16 comments:

  1. Cuba, eh? Haven't heard the word 'fisticuffs' for ages but love it. And, had a crush on Tom Conti for ages. Another nice post, Jo.

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  2. Cuba, eh? Haven't heard the word 'fisticuffs' for ages but love it. And, had a crush on Tom Conti for ages. Another nice post, Jo.

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  3. I willl always stop if I hear Renaissance music. Don't quite know why, I liked it from the first time I heard it. Strange, that.

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    1. Sometimes it's impossible to know why something creeps under our skin, and maybe it doesn't matter. (I hope it doesn't matter!)

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  4. Music, music, music -- where would we be without it? And the Tom Conti reference was a good memory recall for me, too. Loved him in Shirley Valentine.

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    1. Oh joy, someone else who had great memories of Tom Conti!

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  5. You're off again then, are you! Those slippers beside your hearth must feel neglected indeed! Where we live there's rarely silence but the sound I love most of all is the wind in a nearby poplar tree. It sounds like waves on a pebbled beach. Enjoy your Cuban sounds :-)

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    1. Wind in a poplar tree - that would be worth waking up for!

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  6. Living in a small village at the top of a hill,without a pub...it's very quiet here at night. In the morning, I do like the sounds of my friend's cockerel though...he's called Pavarotti.

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    1. A cockerel called Paravotti - I think I'd forgive him for waking me up, with a name like that!

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  7. Ah, what sounds don't make me sit up and take notice? Some I love, some I hate, but I'm never indifferent. I love the sound of the steam tugs's horns as they take to the river. So mournful. I also love the sound of rigging rattling and clinking in the breeze. Music too, like you. Early cuckoos in the spring. Cockerels absolutely. Special voices. I have fallen in love with a voice more than once. My first love in particular. Thanks Jo, this was wonderful!

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    1. Love your canal sounds - and I so agree with you about falling in love with a voice!

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  8. In no particular order: Children's playground voices (I still miss the fun of being with children from my primary teaching days), the cockerel in the early morning - so reminiscent of childhood on a Lancashire smallholding, and that expectant stillness that you can only hear in the early morning countryside...birdsong...a stream trickling over stones...the first lawn-mower in the spring and with it that wonderful waft of freshly cut grass...of course, music - where to start???...You've set me thinking...

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    1. Welcome, Claire - I love the sound of push-mowers (but hate using them) - the petrol ones lack the same rhythm. But the same wonderful smell!

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  9. Just now, I'm listening to a bird tweeting (because it's just about warm enough to have the window open) and remembering the tweeting I heard in Japan - instead of the clicking sound when a pedestrian light is green. Enjoy Cuba!

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