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Overhead wires thought unsightly. Comparative silence was bliss |
The sounds of my life, past and present.
Ѿ Air-raid sirens warning of enemy bombers during WW2. Moaning and wailing. As an infant I asked: why so sinister? Now I see why.
Ѿ Immediately post-war, we were unusual in having a phone. It had a real bell which tinkled, wearily. As if power struggled to get through.
Ѿ Transport was by electric trolley-bus fed from overhead wires via two spring-loaded poles. Gliding past, it hissed and whirred. A more tranquil alternative to the diesel engine.
Ѿ Morning assembly at my secondary school was marked by a quasi-religious service. Strangely, we cynical kids shouted out the familiar hymns. As if finding some kind of release.
Ѿ Producing hourly editions of a daily newspaper requires a fast-working printing press. For fast read noisy, very noisy. To the point of menace and excluding all other sounds.
Ѿ London means underground tube trains. Tube travel sound is regularly captured in movies but it’s the hydraulic (pneumatic?) sighing of doors opening and closing I now remember.
Ѿ Reaching the Continent by car involved a cross-channel ferry. A multiplicity of sounds and shouts of barely controlled chaos. Now I relish the silence of Eurotunnel. Sitting at the steering wheel, advancing my watch an hour
Ѿ My first US flat was on a very steep hill. US cars with huge engines strained at the gnat.
Ѿ US again: the insistence (and frequency) of TV commercials while lacking the merciful mute button.
Ѿ Steel plant, Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela. An unknowable extreme sound as if close to the sun.
Ѿ Distant rumbling and more hydra/pneu gasping as a modern garbage lorry picks up and discharges our wheelie.
Ѿ An unidentified hum if I wake from sleep during the night.
The symbol? Use your imagination.
Some familiar, others more personal to you. For me as I lie in bed just returning to the live world around 7:30am I hear that distant rumble and muffled clatter of the bin lorry down the road and PANIC - leap from bed, don dressing gown and rush out to garage and drive to put out recycling I had forgotten about the night before.
ReplyDeleteYour symbol looks to me like the back end of a pig, but the image is tiny and my eyesight not as good as it used to be. Perhaps if you had referred to the noise of snoring my interpretation could have been relevant.
Sir Hugh: My later life is dominated by forgetfulness but I rarely if ever forget the bin routine. Perhaps because bin collection occurs almost always immediately after my 90-minute singing lesson which ends 10 am.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: On Monday. Fresh start to the week; fresh pursuit of the "true" singing voice.
ReplyDeleteI am at a loss as far as the symbol is concerned, but it looks a little like a stylized monogram, the kind that one put on expensive cuff links when one wore expensive cuff links. Not that I ever did, doubtless one of the great omissions of my life! I would have had to buy suitably tailored shirts, however, and that was never going to happen! My meagre budget went to books. As for noises, there are so many modern sounds with which we have become familiar, and to which our ears have become attuned, it’s hard to imagine life without them. My most enduring sound of all, however, is the cadence of my dear wife’s voice, as she says, “Yes, dear,” in degrees of inflexion to warn of impending wrath or deep affection. That’s a sound I have mastered well, and understand it perfectly.
ReplyDeleteDMG: As I explained earlier a present-day re-reading of my blog over the past 15 years revealed a high degree of repetition, both in subject matter and (less forgivably) in the way many of these posts were expressed. Whether or not this offended my readers is moot, it offended me.
ReplyDeleteIt may have seemed whimsical but I decided to eliminate fifteen subjects that history showed were closest to my heart, singing lessons being the most potent example. I have often blackguarded other bloggers for whingeing they lacked "anything to write about" on the grounds that it betokened acute tunnel vision. This decision - slightly indirectly - should underline my belief that there is no such thing as "absence of subjects".
Simultaneously - and a much harder proposition at that - I intend to focus on originality wherever possible. Both of ideas and of expression. The sounds of my life is not an entirely original subject but it may qualify as "less obvious". Especially since I've tried to pick sounds that pinpoint locations, the passage of time, events, attitudes, etc, which aren't immediate clichés. In fact, once I got started it became obvious (given my 300-word limit) I would only be scratching the surface. No space for Germany, New Zealand, interviewer-interviewee relations, broken family life - all rich in unique noises.
On top of this, one reader has just paid me a possibly left-handed compliment in noting that my comments and re-comments are getting shorter. Hence the symbol reference. Since its roots are slightly risqué and both you and my brother admit to being baffled I'm allowing it to die on the vine.
As to shorter comments and re-comments...