struggling for peace

There's no place of real and absolute peace in this mad world now.

I am just sitting quietly here on the sofa, escaping a little of the heat of the afternoon while I try to expend as little energy as I can. (I worked hard yesterday. The price for that is no chance of any work today.) I'll probably try to have a little nap in a minute, but I'll just get this post out onto my screen first, because if I stop, the thoughts will fade away.

J is off working in her pottery 'studio' – in reality what was the dining room of the house (who 'dines' at home these days?) – and she has her music playing as she works. It's an eighties mix playlist via Qobuz. It's horrific stuff. Rick Astley played on it just now. I was rick-rolled in my own home, independently of the internet. Bonnie Tyler is on now. J is 'singing' along.

I could ask her to stop it, but I don't feel up for the fight.

Our home is in rural Cornwall. There is a lane going by us at the foot of the front garden which sees maybe twenty vehicles a day - possibly forty if you're including tractors. Or 150 if you're counting sheep. So there is only the occasional vehicular interruption to the eighties soundtrack as another delivery van passes by.

And then, just now, a helicopter passed overhead. Helicopters are often assault weapons in military scenarios, but this one, the Cornwall Air Ambulance one, is just a further assault on my ears and brain, even though it's probably going off to be helpful to someone desperate to see it somewhere.

There is probably little chance of me getting the Air Ambulance service to honour a no-fly zone over my house, so I guess I'll have to put up with one of the loudest, most disturbing, non-negotiable noise generators there is in existence in modern civilisation right now, shattering the relative peace of the eighties playlist (Blondie now, that's a bit better).

But where can you go for a bit of peace and quiet these days? It seems sitting on the sofa at my house is not the answer, even if it is a mile to the nearby village, four miles to the nearest shop, six miles to the nearest small town, and thirty miles to the nearest train station.

It's a quiet place, but there is still human made noise everywhere, and I am still struggling to unplug from human world.

But one source of it is preventable right now.

All it takes is being the person in control of the wi-fi router.