Thankful Thursday

My brother, Scriptor Senex aka CJ talked last Thursday about noise: his favourites and his least favourites and he invited people to name theirs.  Which a number of people did.

I commented that amongst my favourites are the loud and clear songs of the Bellbird and the Tui outside The Cottage and rain on the roof or windows when I am snug in bed. One of my dislikes is the adverts on TV (particularly in NZ) when the sound is ramped up so much over the set level for the programme.  (This is denied but I don't believe the denials!).

The more I've thought about sounds since then the more I have realised that most of the sounds I really love are either sounds of nature or sounds of music.  I think that most of us dislike the man-made sounds that intrude into our lives but there are also some natural sounds which frighten or even terrify us.  Having lived through a hurricane which destroyed part of my house on Lewis I can say that it was one of the most frightening experiences of my life.  How the people of Tornado Alley in the US including at least one follower of this blog (I hope you are OK Cynthia - I've just seen more Oklahoma tornados on TV).  So the sounds of hurricane force winds would be amongst my least favourite sounds of nature.  As is the sound of an earthquake - and I've only experienced the noise resulting from a relatively small one.

What I really love, though, is that I live in environments with few neighbours and only the noise of the countryside to listen to (other than, of course, my music which I can play without disturbing anyone).

So today I am thankful for the fact that I have the gift of hearing but that I also have the option of silence in the places where I live.

Open or Closed? That Is The Question

Do you sleep with the window open or closed?  A simple enough question.  But, I wonder, are the answers we all have quite so simple and straightforward.  I ask this because of Francis Garrood's extremely funny story about.....well you can find out C is For Cockchafer.

For my part at home in the Hebrides or in New Zealand I sleep with the windows closed.  But why?  Well in the Hebrides in the winter it would be a rather foolhardy thing to do for rather obvious reasons of wind and rain but in the summer the reason is less obvious: midges!

So why close the windows in New Zealand? 

Before I answer that I should say that I have slept in the open air in a bivy bag in the Australian outback for a couple of weeks with all sorts of scorpions and snakes and so on and not had the slightest qualms.  I stayed at a friend's house last year and slept in a studio with the doors wide open all night (but the worst thing I was likely to be attached by was a mozzie).

At home (in NZ), though, when I first came to live in The Cottage I never closed the curtains (pointless as no one can even see The Cottage never mind me in bed) and sometimes if it was hot instead of putting the air-con on I just kept my bedroom ranch slider open.  I have no insect screens.  There may be few things likely to bite me but I'm still not too keen on the non-bitey things and one day in the middle of the night as I reached for my glass of water I realised that I wasn't the only creature requiring it.  The other one was, however, dead.  I realised just how close I had come to drinking a dead thingy. 

I read that we consume on average 8 spiders a year in our sleep.  I assume that's actually nonsense but it's the thought that counts.  In fact interestingly allowing more insects in our processed food might be more healthy.  Another post?

And then there are animals!

Bear in mind that for me noise is not a factor in either place I live.

So now I keep my windows closed here too.

How about you?

Kwiet Kettle Klub

I was chatting to Pauline on the phone this morning before she went gallivanting for a few days.  All of a sudden her words were drowned by the jug boiling.  I mentioned ‘jug’ yesterday.  In the UK it is called a kettle.  I have no idea what it is called in the US or anywhere else where this is being read (I certainly don’t know the Swedish but that doesn’t matter so much because Dawn Treader has a better understanding of the English as she is spoken than I have.)  Many citizens of New Zealand have a Zip jug.  You know the standard conical jug that stands on a separate base.  It’s a noise devil.  When I’m at my computer in the study I often have the New or some other programme on the TV.  The TV is at the other side of the living room.  As you look through the door from where I’m sitting and turn immediately right the jug sits on the kitchen worktop/counter/work surface.  If I put the Zip jug on then I couldn’t hear the TV.  So this year at vast expense (in one of Briscows many ‘everything reduced’ sales – you only buy something full price in Briscows if you need it desperately)  I bought a Sunbeam ‘Peace and Quiet’ quiet boil jug.  Well that’s how it sounded when I bought it.  Now it seems just as noisy as any other jug.  I’m sure it is much noisier than my cheap while plastic jug in Eagleton which I never notice.  The problem is that you can’t walk into a store and ask whether is jug is quiet or not and they certainly wouldn’t demonstrate it. 

So, if you are bothered by a noisy jug, please join the KKK – the Kwiet Kettle Klub to campaign for kwieter kettles.  Apologies to Kiwis (and anyone else who doesn’t call a kettle a kettle) but the Quiet Jug Club just doesn’t have the same cachet.  Oh and by the way I hereby acknowledge that I have freely pinched the term from Pauline. 

The Countryside Is Noisy

The weather has been very hot so a few nights ago I decided to sleep with my bedroom door with it's newly fitted flyscreen in place open onto the deck. The Cottage is built to modern standards of insulation and, very unusually for New Zealand, it has double glazing throughout as well. So as a general rule I can hear very little at night. I don't sleep with windows open either as a rule because of the many and varied flying creatures which, though harmless, are nevertheless unpleasant as bedfellows.

For the first time the sounds of the night, from which my insulated environment shield me, became loud and real. The call of the Morepork (so called because of its call of the same sound) which roosts in a nearby tree and, like many owls, is not faint-hearted in its announcements to the world; the crickets which surround (and occupy) The Cottage; the wind which rustles the huge trees nearby; the Pukeko screeching in the orchard below (and that really can make your blood curdle); the birds singing their hearts out at 0400; the rustling and snorting of the hedgehogs and possums and countless other creatures of the night all conspired to make constant sleep hard. And once I was awake I could hear the oddly verbose fridge and the excessively loud tick of the kitchen clock. So the perfect sleep to which I am accustomed eluded me.

Last night the door remained closed as it will again tonight. I think it will have to be exceptionally hot before I next bask in the closeness to nature which robs me of my slumbers.