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?