When Boris Johnson first announced that the UK would be going into lockdown on the evening of the 23rd March, I thanked my lucky stars that I would be seeing it out from the peacefully quiet and leafy, residential street of my North London flat.
I’ve experienced my fair share of disruptive roads since living in London; my Camden flat overlooked a crossroads a short drive from University College Hospital, where every ten minutes, at all times of the day and night, an ambulance would sound its sirens on the approach to the traffic lights. In Hackney I lived on a lively street opposite a second-hand furniture store, the doorway of which played host to a group of rastafarians who convened every night to smoke joints, blast reggae music from a boombox and fight for their voices to be heard over the top of it into the early hours. Lockdown in these flats would have been maddening, I told myself, but not here, in my grown-up, adult flat on my peacefully quiet, grown-up, adult street. I slept soundly that night.
As if in cruel cosmic response to my premature relaxation, on the 24th March, the council set up a diversion at the corner of my street and started monotonously drilling down into the cement road to work on the pipes. Over the road, three vans arrived from a lettings agency and set to work stripping the four floors of the house opposite for a planned refurbishment; chucking pieces of furniture, wooden flooring and tiles out of the windows with a brain grating crash onto a seemingly never ending pile below.
As the earth’s sonic vibrations simmer down to historical lows, and many are delighted to hear the beauty of bird song audibly emerge in the stead of absent cars and aeroplanes, my peacefully quiet, leafy, residential street is louder than I’ve ever known it. From 9 til 5 a symphony of drilling, hammering, clattering and building-site banter fills the air, providing the soundtrack to my sabotaged attempts to ‘work from home’ and my procrastinatory internet searches for the most effective earplugs still being delivered during the pandemic.
But it’s not only the outdoor jungle that is upsetting my sound chakras. It turns out that my neighbours – my lovely, quiet, barely noticeable neighbours on all sides – are only lovely, quiet and barely noticeable when they’re out of the house all day, and I am too. My upstairs neighbours have started an elaborate exercise routine that takes place every morning and shudders the entire flat with such vigour that I have had several anxiety dreams about the ceiling falling through onto my breakfast. They also seem to be unaware that door stops exist, as the swift creaking and crashing of opening and closing doors sends relentless booming noises and vibrations down into my flat both day and night.
The couple on the other side of my kitchen wall have clearly taken up D.I.Y during lockdown; adding a call and response effect to the banging from the construction outside. If I escape into my absent flatmate’s room at the back of the flat, I get to enjoy a concert performed by the teenagers of the family who live opposite us; one of them strums on an out of tune guitar whilst the other croons over the top, apparently unaware of the tempo or pitch of his partner’s backing track.
Were my neighbours always this loud, the walls of my flat always so paper-thin and the ceilings so tremblingly weak? Or is my hearing becoming so sensitive to the unchanging surroundings of my now overfamiliar environment that my brain is registering normal levels of disruption with a heightened awareness, picking out even the slightest diversion from the silence my ears wish were available to me?
Or do I have hyperacusis, a rare and difficult to diagnose hearing problem which makes sounds appear louder in the brain than they actually are in reality? Or maybe it’s the result of a general state of hypervigilance that has visited me ever since the beginning of this crisis that no amount of yoga or cardiovascular activity seems able to expel? Lockdown has proven catastrophic for my hypochondria….
The precarious solution I’ve found is that wearing foam ear-plugs under over-ear headphones, blasting a YouTube video called ‘10 HOURS BROWN NOISE Noise Blocker for Sleep, Study, Tinnitus, Insomnia’ has allowed me to block out the majority of the general hubbub and work productively enough from home without my blood boiling to life threatening levels. The council’s roadworks stopped after a few days, although the cordoned hole and street diversion remain in place for an inevitable return that I wake up in fear of every morning.
For the construction site over the road there has been a noise complaint to the council, which is proving to be fruitlessly frustrating (‘Well unfortunately the government hasn’t explicitly banned construction from going ahead, so I’m not sure wheth-’… thanks Boris). For the noisy neighbours upstairs, there is a polite (passive aggressive) note asking them to ‘please be mindful of how far your noise carries’, which remains folded up on my bookshelf as I continue the debate in my head as to how reasonable it is to ask my fellow citizens to stop exercising, talking and generally moving around inside their own flat. I miss my peacefully quiet, leafy, residential North London street with my lovely, quiet, barely noticeable neighbours; I also miss being able to leave it. Still, it’s better than sirens or 3AM reggae.
The Jaded Optimist 