Turn that down, please

By Neil Armstrong

Sunday morning in our warrenous little downtown looks like the front page of a brochure advertising the morning after the night before.

A man who parachuted into the street wearing a blindfold would soon be able to draw up a detailed shop plan just by sniffing every five yards. The litter, if separated into discrete piles according to object, would make a line longer than there will soon be of creditors outside Europe’s banks.

And although there are very few actual people, there is massive evidence that some hours before a large number had invaded and routed the place. Businesses, for the most part, are snoozing, sated and exhausted from their early hours debauch.

The streets are even quieter than they would be an hour after the reintroduction of wild tigers into the environment. Yet I have to turn my phone onto vibrate because of the noise.

I stand in the middle of the street at the center of three stores. Two face each other off with large mechanical figurines. The green one is smaller than his blue opponent and facially incomplete.

But he can dance. The tall blue one can’t, but can move his head from side to side. He laughs openly at the green one’s incomplete face. The green one usually attracts more children. But it is the blue one who wears a ``don’t touch” sign.

Their day-long on-a-loop robotic sales patter consists of encomiums to buy phones. It is splattered with bursts of pop and industrial dance music that would be a problem if they were audible only on the inside of the shop. As it is, they are completely stereophonic in the world at large. As I said, it’s Sunday morning.

Completing the triangle is a shoe shop suffering a real identity crisis. It thinks it’s a night club. It is half right. It has the most expensive speaker system of the three and is therefore the most loathsome. I peer in and can’t see any assistants.

But there must be a DJ somewhere. A not very good one. No one walks by for at least three minutes. So someone turns the volume up. Chain saws and road drills make you cover your ears. A stray cat actually runs as it passes by the speakers.

I want to scream, “Turn it down,” but there is no one human to appeal to. The green man starts to dance again as the blue man mocks me with a head shake. I’ve got to get out of here.

The World Health Organization recommends daytime outdoor sound levels of 50 decibels to prevent people from becoming ``moderately annoyed." I didn’t have a sound pressure level to hand but based on that I had become ``dangerously wound up” I would hazard the decibels at somewhere near a thousand. I walked to a nearby supermarket. The supermarket’s usual jingle sung by a six-year-old doing an impression of a three-year-old is not looping.

Incredibly, the second movement of Beethoven’s “7th Symphony” is harrumphing sorrowfully down from the ceiling. It instigates a transformation. I no longer want to take two aspirin.

The world is less moronic. And I, the last civilized man, tread softly onto the escalator which takes me to the basement for a 24-pack of toilet paper.

In the United States, classical music has been piped into parks stained with drug dealers and drunks to effect their removal. In the United Kingdom, shops harassed by groups of non-consumer youths congregating preemptively at their doors have played it to send a message that the owners and high culture don’t want them.

My proposal then is classical music only on Sunday mornings. Let our streets be tranquillized with sweet euphonies as we all recover from the night before.

That, or turn it down.

The writer is a textbook writer and translator. He can be reached at aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.