The tail end of Hurricane Bertha is lashing the garden with half a gale. Indeed, looking at the Met Office Inshore Waters Forecast I see that the whole coast of Britain and Northern Ireland is ringed in red, indicating strong coastal winds, except for the south coast of Devon and Cornwall. I ducked the wind this morning by dint of spending it in the kitchen extracting an odd super of honey. (It's a bit of a waste having to wash the extractor and do all the clearing up afterwards just for one super, but that's all there was left to take off, and I must have got ten or a dozen jar's worth out of it).
I ventured out in the afternoon and finished planting out the stash that had been sitting by the front door for a while, and were destined for a relatively sheltered stretch of border just uphill of the bog bed, but the wind annoyed me. I really don't like wind. It makes me edgy, and ruins my concentration. When I'd finished the planting I came in for a cup of tea, and when loud music started up from the next door but one neighbour's field I decided to call it a day.
The neighbours, in fairness to them, are not normally noisy. In fact, it's generally quite difficult to tell whether anybody is at home. They are making up for it now, though, as I can hear the music clearly from inside through the walls and the double glazing and with the doors shut. I was slightly surprised that they hadn't followed the standard precaution for people planning to hold a loud event and invited the neighbours, even if it's not going to be their sort of party and you don't expect them to come, but then it occurred to me that it may not directly be their party either. I would not like to hazard a guess at how old our next door but one neighbour is, but she has grown up children, and grandchildren, and her husband died just before Christmas. Without wanting to leap to ageist assumptions, loud al fresco guitar music doesn't seem her usual style, and maybe her field is being used by a young relative or friend to hold a party of their own.
I'm pretty sure the music is live. There was a burst of tuning and practice noises before the evening got going, followed by something poppy that was definitely made in a studio, but now we're down to a fairly stripped down line-up, vocals, bass, guitar, drums. It's actually not bad, although not especially good, and goodness knows how loud it must be when you are standing right next to the band, given that I can hear it comfortably from inside and across another small field. I don't know why live music at private events often ends up so loud. There was an evening wedding reception where the band got so overwhelming that I had to go and stand outside because my ears were beginning to ring, and a fiftieth birthday party with a group doing classic rock cover versions who were quite good, but so loud that any kind of conversation in the room they were in was impossible, and all the party goers who didn't want to dance the night away (the majority, by the time you get to a fiftieth) ended up sidling away from the centre of the proceedings into the kitchen and the corridors.
The Colchester Arts Centre is generally a safer bet. I suppose they are constrained by planning, and health and safety rules about safe levels of noise exposure. I once found a Faustus concert verged on the physically painful, when I sat too close to the speakers, but even the Bad Shepherds have been OK. I am a wimp about loud noise, having ears that ring easily, not to mention developing a strange sense of pressure when it's about to rain.
The guitar band, if it was live, is taking a break. We're back to dance music again. Luckily we sleep at the other end of the house.
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