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The beauty of noise; I was walking down a street in Calcutta, noisy enough, but then overlaying, almost unifying, the horrendous concatenation of noise I heard the divinest multi-tintinnabulation behind me and turned to see a truckload of half a million empty bottles shimmering within a thousand metal crates, as the truck rocked and swayed along the pitted road. Marinetti and the Futurist composers would have been inspired!

But the beauty of urban noise is never as great in the morning, perhaps too early in the morning. Lying in bed and listening to the sizzle of tyres of the first cars on a wet road; the first bus going through; and then the distant thunder, at about four thirty, of the first permitted wave of planes stacking up along the flightpath into Heathrow; long-haul planes trailing behind them through the skies the distinctive lustres of their origin; from Bangkok, from Calcutta, from Vladivostok, from Vancouver; as romantic to me as Masefield's vessels:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine'
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine
Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping though the Tropics by the palm-green shores…

But the best sound of all is the one you hear only in the very heart of the night, so late that it is almost early; and that is the sound that remains when all single and identifiable sounds have vanished. Lie in bed, listen carefully; if you persevere you can detect a low, almost imperceptible growl, the incessant muted growl of the city.

Crowd, traffic, noise. It all adds up to that choice city word: stress.

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