bird of dawning

I woke early, in time to hear the rooster crowing.  I love the sound of the rooster.  It is a cry of hope, heralding the start of a new day, and of reassurance.  The chickens made it through the night.  We remembered to lock the hen house, and the fox didn't break in.  Sometimes, if I wake at four or so in the morning, I can't go back to sleep until I've heard the rooster, affirming that all is well outside.

It saddens me when I read in the local papers of disputes between neighbours over the noise made by someone's cockerel, especially if they live in the country.  Why buy a house in a rural location if you don't like the sound of a rooster?  It's like people who move in next to a medieval church, and then complain about the noise made by bell ringing practice or on Sunday mornings.  It's a church.  It has bells.  They have been there for centuries.  If you don't like them why did you move there?  I think people who find the noise of their neighbour's rooster intolerable must at some deep level find their general proximity to their neighbour upsetting.  The crowing of a cockerel inside a hen house is, objectively speaking, no louder than the dawn chorus, heard from a bedroom, even with a window open, and whoever heard of anyone complaining that the noise of the blackbirds and robins was preventing them from sleeping?

Once at work I was asked for advice on sound-deadening shrubs by somebody who had been ordered by an environmental health officer to plant them to shield the noise of their swimming pool pump from the next door neighbours, who had made a complaint about it.  Fresh out of horticultural college and eager, I expressed my doubt that the amount of planting they could do in a domestic garden would make any difference at all to the noise, since academic research showed that you needed a buffer of shrubs and trees tens of metres deep to give a measurable improvement.  I suggested that a better approach would be to go to an automotive parts supplier or yacht chandler and invest in some sound insulating foam for the pump housing, like that used around engine compartments in boats.  With hindsight I think that although this was good technical advice, it may have missed the point, and that what the environmental health officer may chiefly have intended to do was give the neighbour visible reassurance that something was being done.  Even though it didn't really cut down the noise, it might have stopped them worrying about it.

I mind the noise from the lettuce farm, when they are particularly busy, running lorry engines in the yard and charging about on their forklifts and tractors, much more than I do the background noise from the local main roads, even though the roads can be quite noisy when the air is damp and the wind is from the right (or rather the wrong) direction.  I mind the noise of the roads more than an equivalent amount of noise from passing aircraft.  That's because the lettuce farm noise seems to uniquely blight my house, and the other properties on the farm, whereas road noise affects lots of people, so doesn't make me feel so much as though I made an unfortunate choice of residence.  And aeroplane noise affects absolutely everybody, no matter how carefully you chose the lie of the land where you live, so I take that even less personally.

The weather forecast was for heavy rain by ten, but since it had stopped raining by the time I'd finished my breakfast I thought I'd go outside and get on with the garden until it started.  We'd only had 6mm of rain in the previous 24 hours, but that was enough to have made the centre of the gunnera bed truly swampy.  I moved operations to lighter ground further up the slope, although it would have been nice to actually finish a job.  Half past ten came, and I ducked from the Radio 3 studio guest (a feature I find peculiarly annoying) to Radio 2 Popmaster, which is conveniently scheduled for the same time.  There was still no rain by half past eleven, and at half past twelve the Systems Administrator came out to say that the weather was very peculiar, as the rain radar kept showing huge showers sweeping in our direction, which petered out about ten miles short of us.  The SA had not got all the tools out to get on with the deck, on the basis that it had been about to rain all morning, but thought that the rain really would arrive in about forty-five minutes, and would I like to hold off lunch until it did?  I agreed that was a splendid plan to make the most of the dry spell, and went on weeding until quarter to two, when it still wasn't raining, but I was extremely hungry.

There were showers in the afternoon, and I went and pricked out seedlings in the greenhouse, but it goes to show how sometimes the extra information we get from technology is counter productive.  The SA, mesmerised by the high tech evidence of imminent rain, had missed out on a dry morning, while for me, working on the low tech basis that it wasn't raining until it was, it had been business as usual.