10th October 2018 The utter helplessness of suffering from noise.

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Wednesday 10th 44-63F,  a bright start, with light winds and a little misty. The mist and early light added enough interest to warrant quite a few photographs. Not many birds about today. Except for the mink gulls sunbathing on a humped field. They resented my presence, even at 200 yards and moved further away.

A warm and sunny day with light winds but it only reached about 63F. Did I mention that Lime has now removed its illegal el-scooters from Copenhagen's streets?

Thursday 11th 52-63F bright when the sun rises and temporarily calm. Warm and sunny all day but rather windy. No ride today.

Denmark has been using too high a figure for allowable traffic noise according to the WHO. [World Health Organization] Instead of Denmark's 58dB, the WHO suggests 53dB to avoid the chronic diseases which result from suffering excessive noise. The new figure would easily double the number of residents plagued by traffic noise. No doubt tyre roar is the major culprit.

There is a corridor along every major road and motorway where the constant noise is intolerable. I'd put that corridor as several kilometers wide from my long experience of cycling the motorway's nearby roads and lanes. Many otherwise, highly desirable properties are completely unsaleable at any price thanks to traffic noise.

The main problem with unwanted noise is the sense of absolute helplessness in being unable to avoid it. You can't sell your house, to go somewhere [hopefully] quieter, precisely because of the constant noise. Getting out of the car to view a rural property near any major highway can be a shock to the system! 

A few years ago the nearest road was resurfaced with much coarser gravel in the asphalt, than before. The sudden increase in traffic noise was staggering and continues to this day. Despite enjoying a greater distance from the road than many of our neighbours, it became difficult to impossible to hold conversations out of doors. Literally everything we said to each other had to repeated louder and from standing much closer to each other. Having a procession of intercontinental lorries using the same road as a rat run doesn't help.

The road is also popular with "sporting" motorcyclists enjoying the sharp bends and humped nature of the road at high speeds. Countless hundreds pass along the road in warmer weather on some days.We often compare it to the TT races as high performance engines scream along the short straights.

On my morning walks I can often hear a single car coming from a kilometer away despite being profoundly deaf in my left ear. When the sound finally subsides it feels as if I have gone completely deaf. Only the clomp of my walking boots reminds me that I can still hear a bit.

Then there is the constant crowing of the neighbour's several cockerels. From before 3am in the morning in summer, they scream their greetings to the world, almost without pause.

It used to be the same neighbour's continuous chainsawing from morning to night. As they produced firewood from felled logs for the extended family. I was fortunate and went to work in a noisy factory to get away from it on weekdays. My wife was not so lucky. Despite being an avid gardener she often had to retreat indoors when the chainsawing became too much.

The neighbour had been made redundant so sawed every day of the week for a decade and a half. For many years we would leave home early on weekend mornings. Only returning in the evening when the racket had finally died down. There was no other choice if we were to retain our sanity.

This was all going on just the other side of the shared, boundary hedge. Only a few short feet from our bedroom and living room windows. Then the inevitable tractor would be started close to the hedge so that a hydraulic log splitter could be used. The tractor was left running even when they went in for meals or to watch football on TV. Even as I struggled to repair our damaged roof after the Great Storm of 1999 they sawed logs from morning to night.

Fortunately the real owners of our adjoining back garden sold up and moved on. So the neighbours, who had only borrowed the previous lawn, lost their free sawmill grounds. The chainsaws still run but are more distant and have only pallets and demolition timbers to cope with. Rather than countless hundreds of tree trunks and large branches which passed through the garden next door.

The constant stench of burning oil paint on chipboard, or unimaginably worse, is just a small price to pay for being more distanced from the chainsawing. One day, some of the younger members of the extended family came around to our house. Their dog's years of constant crying and barking had driven us to open the windows and play the song: "Who Let the Dogs Out?" The kids told us that their "parents" were about to ring the police to complain about the noise!

In our last home, again a quiet, rural, detached property, our nearest neighbour let his dog bark for 18 hours a day on a fenced run on our side of his home. The dog never drew breath for years until we ourselves moved on. We had hoped dearly that the dog would pass on but it never did.

Here in Denmark the Welsh dog was replaced with another neighbour's dog. Which screamed like a cross between a baby and a tortured chimp for countless hours every single day as the father watched porn in front of his kids.

I visited my parents some hundreds of miles away in the UK to be woken in the middle of the night. By the sound of a vacuum cleaner being used energetically on bare floorboards just above the bedroom ceiling. This was accompanied by loud rock music blaring from wide open windows at 3am.

"Care in the community" mental outpatients were being housed by the local authorities in the flats just above the private apartments on the ground floor. This racket had been going on for years completely unknown to me!

Despite my widowed mother's protestations I went upstairs to remonstrate with them. The noise stopped for the rest of my short stay. There were five floors and dozens of families right along this smart Georgian terrace. I wonder how many other grateful neighbours sighed with temporary relief? I bet none of them would have dared to speak to the deranged culprits for fear of reprisal or even physical attack!

That's the problem with noise. We feel absolutely powerless to stop it. This has a terrifying long term impact on our lives and our health. What is also absolutely certain, without a shadow of  doubt, is that those who make the rules about noise enjoy a quiet 'leafy' neighborhood. They, unlike many victims of deliberate, or casual noise makers, sleep soundly at night!
 

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