The noise diary
Around the third week of a neighbour’s bass through the wall, somebody rings the council, and the council sends a form. It is nearly always a table. Date. Time the noise started. Time it stopped. What the noise was. How it affected you. Fill it in for two weeks, sometimes four, and send it back. Nobody will come out to listen until the paper says it is worth coming.
The form is the first party to the dispute that is not on the complainant’s side, and it starts teaching straight away. There is no column for loudness. There are columns for duration and repetition, because what an officer can act on is a pattern, and one terrible night is not a pattern. So the person keeping the diary learns that last Tuesday, the worst night so far, counts for almost nothing on its own. What will count is the eighth Tuesday. They rang about a feeling. The form wants a timetable.
The last column teaches the harder lesson. How it affected you sounds like an invitation to say everything, and people take it: I could feel it in my chest. My daughter cried. I have started to dread Thursdays. But the question the council will eventually ask is not whether the noise affected this person. It is whether it would bother an ordinary, reasonable one, and the unusually sensitive are expressly not the standard. A useful diary therefore records the effect its writer is entitled to, not the one they had. Could not hear television at normal volume. Woken 1.40, again 2.15. The writer learns to report on their own ears as if those ears belonged to somebody steadier.
Then there is what the diary does to the listening. This site has found before that the ear can stop hearing a sound without consulting its owner: the fridge’s hum gets filed under the room and is no longer delivered. That filing is what makes most noise survivable, and the diary forbids it. You cannot get used to a sound you have to clock in and out. To get the start time right, the keeper starts listening for the bass before it begins, and an evening when it never comes is spent waiting for it, which is its own kind of noise. Two weeks of gathering evidence trains exactly the attention that the complaint was meant to get rid of.
Even the neighbour changes in the writing. Before the form, the noise came from them: the couple at number nine, who wave in the mornings. In the diary they become a source, described by type — amplified music, bass, voices — and the column gives no room for the wave. That is deliberate, and fair, since the officer must judge a sound and not a family. But the diary-keeper has to write it every night, and fourteen nights is long enough for a column to become a habit of mind. Plenty of disputes that end well end with somebody knocking on the door instead. That is the one remedy the form has no row for.
The column that costs most looks the most clerical. A start time is free: the noise announces it. A stop time can only be written by someone still awake to notice the stop. At 2.15 the bass ends, the house goes quiet, and the keeper reaches for the pen, so that the one moment of relief in the night is turned into evidence as it happens.
The form asks when the noise stopped, and the only way to answer is to be listening when it does.
Thread: over the fence