I've chosen noise as my next topic to explore as it's one that fascinates me, and I haven't quite got my head around it fully yet.
I have a very mixed relationship with noise. I'm a musician by trade, and a music teacher. I LOVE noise. When I was teaching secondary music I could quite happily sit at my desk surrounded by a class of thirty kids playing keyboard while I marked my A level essays, and still be able to pick out the ones who were hitting the demo button instead of doing their work. My classroom was noisy and chaotic, and I loved it.
On the flip side, sitting in a restaurant trying to have a meal I can literally lose the ability to speak, because I can't process the level of noise around me. Or maybe it's the type of noise - people speaking, glasses clinking, plates and cutlery, waiters walking around... I remember feeling a complete failure because every time I would go out for a nice meal with my ex-husband we would sit in silence. I found it really hard to hear what he was saying, even though he was only just across the table, and it was such a gargantuan effort to me to get my thoughts in order to think of anything to say.