Wednesday 17 June 2015

Alone in a crowd


I have finally bought myself one of these - a 4G iPod Mini. When Green-Eyes was a child, these were the must-haves, but now, of course, the phones have taken over.

I am going to wipe all the music off it and replace it with the complete series of 'On Mardle Fen', plus all sorts of other audio dramatisations which I will spend bleak Winter nights listening to in bed as a blissful form of escapism.

Mine is second-hand from eBay, and I came upon it - having just decided to get one - about 3 minutes before the end of the sale, so I got it for £10.50 including postage. Most of them sell for around £25 - £40, so I am quite pleased with myself.

When these things first came out, you had to be very careful not to kill people stepping deafly off the pavement when driving through town, and these days I spend most of my time walking through town, trying to avoid the 50% of fellow pedestrians who cannot leave their phones alone for more than a minute, and who cannot walk and use their thumbs at the same time. I feel a rant coming on.

You can blame these iPods for the sole reason why Ambulance, Police and Fire sirens are ear-splittingly and dangerously loud these days. They have to be set to that level so that they cut through the loud music being played in the ears of their users, but I reckon it would be a good - if a little drastic - way of teaching others that it is not appropriate to walk around permanently surrounded by 125 decibel concert-level music. If they were to survive being hit by trucks, they are going to deafen themselves anyway, so will only be hit by a truck later, even when they are not listening to music.

I almost got killed the first day I walked through Amsterdam, because I didn't associate the rather melodic bell chimes with the 50 ton tram which was bearing down on me with no intention of stopping. I was pulled out of its path by a local, but I was too shocked to thank him properly.

I don't know about you, but I hate being isolated from ambient sound when I walk around town - or, especially, the countryside.  Never mind the safety aspect of it - to get the best out of any walk is to hear birdsong, dogs barking, people's snippets of conversation etc. behind the traffic noise. It's all part of the experience, isn't it?

13 comments:

  1. We occasionally have horse riders passing behind our house. It's surprising how many of them have both cigs in their mouths and ear-pieces in their ears. One wonders what the purpose is?

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  2. I've lived with sound plugged into my ears since the eighties. Recorded books were not so available then, and I listened to music while I wove. Now I use the little MP3's to hold my books. Who could have imagined.

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    1. British cloth mill-workers were deafened by the sound of the machines, and developed their own sign-language. There was one famous Lancashire drag comedian who made an entire career by mimicking them.

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  3. I fear for the riders, runners and walkers who use our narrow country road for their exercise plugged into their iPods completely oblivious to all else. The reason that none have been injured so far, is all due to safe driving by the primary road users.

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  4. Shall have to think which sort of walk I prefer Tom. Being deaf I sometimes switch my hearing aid off so that I can enjoy the silence when I am walking.

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  5. I'm with you on this one. Even when we are driving in the car and don't really hear the birds, I like the music from the radio to be in the background and not in the foreground.

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    1. My sister used to put Donna Summer on at night after she had passed her test, and just go driving to disco for the sake of it. Sometimes music really goes with hard driving.

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  6. I'm fussy about sounds. Nature sounds- yes, people sounds- no.

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    1. I had an idyllic moment a couple of Summers ago, when I lay in an old orchard, on the bank of a wide and shallow river in the dappled sunlight, listening to the water trickling over the rocks, and children splashing around and shouting at the same time. It was wonderful and all was well with the world for that brief time. A little later, horses and riders waded up and along, and one horse just stamped the shallows for sheer delight. My day was as perfect as an English day can be. That was by Iford Manor, here in Somerset.

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  7. I absolutely agree about needing to hear the ambient sounds. I was appalled when Walkmans came out, those huge tape players that strapped to your body.

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