At too high a price, I know, the closure of our air space brought a few days of blissful silence without the overhead roar of jet engines. Last weekend, when the A34 was closed for work on the Wolvercote viaduct, we in West Oxford enjoyed a day free of traffic noise. I awoke early on Sunday morning to an eerie silence; later I cycled through Port Meadow revelling in the sound of birdsong.
Back it all came with a vengeance on Monday, though. Pedalling past the Perch, I endured the screaming engines from one of the RAF’s clapped-out VC10s passing low above me. This was followed by the hideous roar of traffic noise, which sounded, as it always sounds, like the passage of a never-ending express train.
You know, I would do anything – short of voting Green, of course – to have this racket permanently silenced.
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