Volume control

Back in the 1940’s Aldous Huxley pointed out that the volume of the world had been turned up. He was speaking of radio.
We now have daytime TV, DVDs, PVRs, iPods, polyphonic phones, Wii consoles, Nintendos, X Boxes and Guitar Hero on the PS3, to name but a few.

It’s a well documented fact than ten-year olds have an innate, atavistic understanding of arcane DVD and game console functions, what they don’t seem to be able to grasp are the basic volume controls.

If you rely on the sound of silence to write, you’re a bit stuffed these days. Especially round my house where, with two young boys, we must endure all of the above, all at the same time.

Over the years I’ve conditioned myself to work to a sound-track. At school I shared a study with a compulsive guitar plucker. He was, I think, rather good at it and, after a while, I found myself unable to concentrate without a little fingerstyle.

I still write to music; hammering away at the keyboard to an eclectic, possibly deranged, mix of hip-hop, crunk, garage, post-punk and synth-pop with a little indie rock on the side. And when I say hammer, I’m not kidding. I’ve just got the old Dell laptop back from the computer doctor who reports that the keyboard has been pounded into a dyslexic silicon pulp: the caps lock key is missing, as are the ‘A’, ‘C’ and ‘K’. It’ll cost me $1500 (about five hundred quid) to have it put right. I’ve e-mailed him to fu off.

Of course, I blame Eminem. For the violence and the language.

In truth I use my iPod as much to mask the electronic farts, bleeps and shrieks of this Brave New World, as for pleasure. The squeals of my kids failing to get past level seven on Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, can be easily and happily exchanged for the Mick Jones-engineered post-punk-revival brilliance of The Libertines' Time for Heroes (Up the Bracket). What my iPod emphatically won’t do is obliterate the auditory shenanigans of my next-door neighbour - a sonic plague of international airport/cargo-handling proportions.

There are a few disagreeable noises capable of cutting through my Sennheisser ambient-sound-suppressing head-phones; these also happen to be the ones which drive me to distraction: cordless impact drill, rivet gun, leaf-blower, cement-mixer, tile-cutter, cordless hammer, cordless heavy-duty Impact wrench, biscuit Mitre saw, and compound Mitre saw. For some reason, repeated sneezing also converts me to a wordless rage.

My neighbour specializes in all of the above alarming machinery and more.

You see, I live in New Zealand. Good old tranquil, bucolic, green, clean New Zealand. Every summer, the citizens of Auckland undertake a household project involving eight or more power tools. The more screechingly sociopathic machines you can bring to bear, the more impressive the project. Mostly, they just like to make a racket, just so the neighbours know they exist.

Site-work starts officially at 7.30 a.m. Unofficially, 6.45. Which means, turn a blind eye to 6.15. So, when I emerge in my undercrackers on a Saturday morning to remonstrate with my neighbour, who’s still sneezing badly from builder’s dust - about the fact that he’s drilling up paving in his driveway at 6.30 in the morning - I’m a difficult, antisocial Pommy git.

I stumbled accidentally into a New Zealand DIY Mega-store and there are at least six aisles devoted to power-tools. I’m reasonably certain there’s also an entire shelf devoted to General Noisemaking Machines: items like the Decibel 8000, whose only function is to spin around at speed producing the kind of high-pitched whine that makes everyone in the vicinity think of Condor-talons and blackboards. Then there’s the Thumper 760VX, which produces a kind of pointless sub-sonic boom and is understood to be unsurpassed for waking up babies.

My first novel (not published) was entirely written in New Zealand to the shrieking, lumping soundtrack of the Decibel 8000 and the Thumper 760VX. I could barely hear myself think.

The Sleepwalker’s Introduction to Flight was mostly written in Singapore, to the gentle thrum of banknotes wafting in the breeze, the tropical rustle of palm leaves and the tinkle of ice. I don’t know, but I suspect the universe may be having a quiet word in my ear here.