Noise

In the news they tell people over and over, “Don’t run in the heat” and don’t go out during the hottest part of the time" and yet they organise fan zones in Nyon, or other events in Asse and more. They tell us that we shouldn’t run, that we shouldn’t cycle but they don’t tell those that make sleeping even harder during a heat wave not to make noise.

Last night I went to sleep absurdly early by recent standards. I went to sleep before 2300, slept for about an hour and a half and then was woken, either by the dish washer that I programmed, or by geniuses (ironic) in cars beeping every few minutes after one of the football teams won the ugly game. Ugly because of the antisocial beeping of horns. Ugly because of the Royal Belge Football Club concerns about corruption within FIFA.

Europe is in the middle of a heatwave where the afternoon temperatures reach 33°c or higher, but where night time temperatures are just 20°c or even less. Local governments are saying “Avoid strenuous activities in the sun” and “make sure to keep cool”. They also offer going to churches or museums because they’re nice and cool.

On the flip-side music festivals such as Crapibana (intentional spelling) choose to have loud banging music from around 1900 last night right up until 0300 this morning. Now, in the best of times this is a nuisance but during a canicule this should be treated as criminal.

Last night was the first night of the Caribana and for the most part it was quiet. It was quiet until 23:30 when one of the less competent sound gremlins got to the audio mixing desk and made it tremendously loud. So loud that I could hear the music clearly. If I knew the artist I would tell you who was playing.

Given that noise pollution is encouraged, from music festivals in summer, on a regular basis, despite all the hot air about them caring for the environment I have come up with a splendid solution.

On Monday we were running in the rain, and getting soaked and two women were discussing Caribana, Paléo, Festineuch and more. During another hike people were speaking about Montreux, and during a book discussion someone said “I don’t think I can be at the next book discussion because of a concert.

Now, on the flipside you have groups that wake up to run at 6am on a Friday and normal society says “But that’s too early” because normal society considers that going out at night until 2am, or watching TV until late is a good use of an evening.

I know, without a doubt that if I ride with one group, especially if there are only 25 people, that it will be hard. It’s because of how hard I know the ride will be that I am not keen to join that group. despite this I still considered going for a bike ride this morning, until noisy neighbours made it impossible for me to have an early night.

There is a bad habit among alcoholics that they need to make noise at night without considering that others may want to sleep. I use the label noot because the people are alcoholics but rather because, in my experience people who behave in a toxic, selfish manner, are usually fuelled by alcohol. They only made noise until midnight but that still scuppered any chance of me going for that ride.

Yesterday afternoon I heard some very loud banging. I thought that it was due to an idiot driving a farming machine into something solid and they were trying to fix the damage. As it continued it made me furious. It’s for this reason that I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon on my bike.

When I rode by the absurd people making a huge amount of noise I saw that they were hammering at the bed of their flat bed truck. For some reason they were hitting it as hard as they could with hammers.

Recently I noticed that with the iPhone 14 checking notifications is a challenge. You have to really want to see notifications for them to show up. In some cases I find that they are automatically bypassed by the current iOS.

Whilst this might seem problematic, most notifications, in 2025 are a waste of time. They are duplicates from Strava, Linkedin, Udemy and plenty of other sites. If these sites are sticky enough, then we will see the notifications on the site, while we’re sitting at a computer, so we don’t need them to appear in our phone notifications.

On Sunday I want to do a bike ride that I have been thinking of doing for months, at this point. It’s an 81km loop that begins in Nyon and ends in Nyon, going via Montricher. The challenge with this ride is that it has 1100m of climbing.

A Slight Let Down

My looking forward to this bike ride is tainted by the news that some alcoholics will have a party from 13:00 onwards in a house/apartment nearby. By law the alcoholics need to stop making noise by 22:00, but the likelihood they will, once drunk is very low.

It often rains for the entire rain of Caribana and this makes me happy. It makes me happy because when I complained to them about their noise pollution two or three years ago they gave me a boiler plate answer instead of doing something about it.

I am currently staying away from my home until Sunday morning because I know that to stay home would drive me nuts. From what I see the Caribana is an event with just 6000 patrons or so, and yet they play the music so loud that it is impossible for me to do anything without hearing it from 18:00 - 03:00 from Wednesday night to Sunday morning.

I find that GoSocial and Meetup are great social networks. It’s an easy way of finding people to do things with, every single weekend. It means that rather than sitting in bars, listening to people talk, hoping for a fun activity, that is not drinking, to be mentioned, you can find a group to do things with.

The flipside to this is that you meet 12-25 people per activity. Sometimes you will meet the same people again, more than once, but more often than not you meet a new group each time.