…this ol’ Jurassic Scots scribbler is normally impervious to extraneous noise… utter silence is not welcome when I write or indulge my SOSYAL NETWURK stuff on the laptop… at home, background bruit is usually provided by SKYNews, which is so bad, its often good, if yeez know what I mean… I can sit in any people-packed clone of the Starbucks chain, with multiple conversations humming away around me, happily tapping away on the Mac… on long train journeys, constant, ambient noise is never a distraction to me… what a shock to my aural system it was then today, when I visited a Japanese restaurant for a late lunch… it was almost last orders when I sat in my booth… no compooooter with me, just fiddling with messages on the Samsung thing-y… the only other diners at that hour were a group of expatriate ladies of middling age, crammed into the booth next to mine… I say ‘crammed’, ‘coz, regardless of how wide or long their table and seating arrangements, it clearly wasn’t accommodation enuff for their conversation…
…I should have known at the start when I tried to give my order for Gyoza Dumplings, Shrimp Tempura and Chicken Katsu… the caterwauling from the adjacent group made it necessary to repeat the order three times… I wasn’t so much ‘listening’ rather than having my ears assailed by the four of them all talking at once in what appeared to be four different simultaneous ‘conversations‘… the modus seemed to indicate a philosophy of ‘the louder one speaks/shouts, the more important the message’, even though not one of them was taking heed of anyone else’s diatribe… my initial pique at this prandial interlude lapsed into amusement as the unspoken competition from the Society of Screechers degenerated into a free-for-all race to determine which of them could say the most without apparent pausing for breath… I would like to record what any of the conversational content from the quartet was about, but sadly, communication fell a distant second to volume control… the lunch itself was enjoyable – its hard to screw up on the menu items I had chosen… and I s’pose I should whisper a small ‘thanks’ for being able to attend Listening to Ladies Who Lunch, Loudly and Long, as it served as great practice for when next I’m in my normal sound-bound writing mode… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!
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