I’m certainly not totally against noise. I’ve seen the loudest band in the world several times, probably have minor hearing damage to show for it, and don’t regret it. The main reason I don’t regret it is that anything that turns down the volume dial on the rest of existence can’t be all bad. For there is a time and place for everything and, increasingly, it’s proving impossible to identify the location where tranquillity can be found. Perhaps it’s just me being my familiar intolerant self. For example, I’ve found myself shushing people at heavy metal concerts. That can’t be right surely? Allow me to elaborate… 

If I go to a metal gig I tend to avoid the front. If someone elbows me in the face while flailing around to the sounds, my reflex reaction is to express my displeasure physically. So it’s better for all concerned if I plant myself around halfway back. Trouble is, I then find myself among the gobshites. The idiots who, having shelled out on a ticket, then proceed to spend the entire performance talking mindless shit to their companions. But, because some inconsiderate characters on the stage are playing loud music, they need to shout. Loudly and incessantly throughout the performance. Try as I might, I find it really difficult to lose myself in the music with some fucktard just behind my right ear, bellowing at his pointless friend about what he had for breakfast, how many pineapples he can fit up his butt, or whatever. So I find myself in the surreal situation of asking people to pipe down. At a heavy metal concert…

At least, at a heavy metal concert you still have the option of moving toward the speakers and braving the moshers (and resultant potential ABH convictions). Other entertainment media are inevitably even more vulnerable to the endless babble of the drones. If I even have to begin explaining what is wrong with talking in a cinema, then please stop reading this now, go find a spoon, and scoop out your own sorry eyeballs. The only question, really, is why people do it. The generous interpretation is ignorance, though the very term has now come to encompass bad manners in some colloquial usage. While there is certainly some attention-seeking involved in some cases, for many offenders, it just doesn’t occur to them to shut the fuck up. Ever…

There are no environments where silence is golden anymore. The concept of quiet contemplation has been lost to us as a species. Libraries, once temples to hush and knowledge, have become glorified crèches with free internet café facilities. It may well be nice for young mothers to have somewhere to let their shrieking offspring run riot, and popular to have a convenient place for bored teenagers to check their Facebook for free. But libraries once provided an oasis of calm for those who couldn’t otherwise escape from noise – vital for some poor souls who had nowhere else to study in peace (or perhaps escape a home filled with screaming infants and callow adolescents bullying each other on social network sites). Yet these final bastions of serenity have also inevitably fallen to the gobshite hordes.

Where does it all begin? Part of the blame must rest with the mobile phone, a device apparently designed to assault tranquillity on every front. From its ability to play tinny dance music on public transport, to its constant, insistent demands that its owner engage in brain-suckingly pointless conversation, call it what you will – mobile, cellphone, iphone – it is not your friend, and you are not its master. Surely, it cannot be a coincidence that, as the forms of media for communication have multiplied, meaningful conversation has withered on the vine. I’ve often thought that the sign of a true friendship is the ability to sit at a table in a pleasant bar together, and not feel the need to utter a word if there was nothing to say. Yet most social environments abhor silence more vehemently than nature abhors a vacuum – the prospect of calm in a conversation instilling a sense of raw panic in most people in mere seconds, allayed only by producing your communication device and filling the ether with yet more cerebral flatulence.

It is my belief that this goes back further than infants receiving their first mobile phone, to the very earliest months of existence. It occurs to me that, in the days of our distant ancestors, any baby making the amount of racket now accepted as normal would be abandoned to die. It would attract predators, and better one exasperating mouth silenced than the entire clan put at risk. Now, the situation is reversed. Even the dullest infant rapidly learns that shrieking attracts attention and reward. Perhaps this begins the building sense of entitlement that seems to be becoming increasingly prominent in our culture. At the very least, surely it inculcates the value of making a constant, infuriating, pointless din in every breathing moment. So, for the few among you who still value moments of pleasing, simple silence, I tip my hat to you. The rest of you, please, just once SHUT THE FUCK UP!