MORNING IS BROKEN with the arrival of the African leaf-blowers, every Saturday. The room in which I sleep is at the back of my apartment, on the first floor of a four-storey conversion which backs on to the tree-lined garden/outdoor smoking lounge of a large office building. Naturally, the trees in the office garden shed leaves. That's okay. The building managers hire a leaf-blowing company to get rid of them and that's okay too, despite my antipathy towards leaf-blowing machines. But the leaf-blowers begin to blow leaves at 7.45am on Saturday, and I'm sorry, but that is not okay - emphatically not so, writes Eoin Lyons
At this time, if I raise my head to a 45-degree angle from my pillow but remain otherwise inert beneath the duvet, through my bedroom window I can see a man standing 10 yards away at the top of the grassy incline that stops at our back wall, looking directly at me and screaming in Congolese as he casually swings his leaf-blower around, as an elephant might its trunk. They like to talk while they work, you see, and as the leaf-blower that each operates is insanely loud, conversation must be bellowed at each other.
The first morning I saw the leaf blower, I raised an arm to wave at him, in what I thought would be a suitably humorous way to acknowledge the fact that he could see me in my bed and although he saw me, he didn't wave back. Something in the non-response unsettled me, and I cowered under the sheets until the sound died down. I was only partially clothed and I didn't want to get out of bed while the leaf-blower was there. If he hadn't waved back or even cracked a smile when I groggily raised an arm to greet him, how would he react to the gruesome sight of my naked form dashing to the livingroom? I know the answer. He would raise the leaf blower, gun the engine and the wind would slam me against the bedroom wall through the smashed window.
It ranks among the more intimidating starts to the day, but I'm not quite sure what I can do to alter my dawn chorus. I need the window open in order to sleep because it is summer. If leave the window open but the blind down, the cool night breeze rattles the blind and it knocks against the open window frame, waking me up. I have to keep the window open and the blind up in order to sleep. This gives the leaf-blower his view and I can't tell him to cease and desist because blowing leaves is his job, and we all have to work.
Every Friday night I forget to adjust my alarm from its weekday setting of 8.15am. But every Saturday the leaf-blowers get me out of bed at 8, with the result that I tend to forget about the set alarm that I have left in the far corner of my living room in order to get me out of bed and across the apartment every Monday to Friday. During the week it is this micro-commute that drags me into consciousness and prevents me from smashing the snooze button, rolling over and waking up six hours later, and although the alarm issues a hideous piercing shriek, on the last few Saturdays I have heard it only after 15 minutes, because during that time I have been in the shower.
On the third Saturday upon which I was woken by the leaf-blowers, I was lathering up once more when the doorbell rang. Rushing to get there, I caught my toe on the edge of the bath-tub and fell sliding down the wall to the floor like a melting snowball on a window pane. By the time I reached the door with a towel barely covering my modesty, I could hear the alarm ringing once more in the livingroom behind me. I opened and the downstairs neighbour confronted me, curtly requesting that I turn off my damn alarm. I simply couldn't believe it - it was the alarm that had woken her and not the leaf-blowers? I had to ask her about the leaf-blowers, and when I did she looked at me blank and uncomprehending. I clarified.
- The leaf blowers out the back, blowing leaves. The nihilistic howl. Every Saturday.
- My bedroom is at the front. Your alarm is what wakes me up every Saturday.
There and then I decided to use the Congolese men for my own benefit, and for hers. The following Saturday I had to be somewhere early, and yet on Friday night I deliberately turned off the alarm and left it all in the hands of the leaf-blowers. Downstairs, she would sleep like a baby. Upon waking the next morning to the bellowing, the buzz-saw chorus and the view of that nozzle which so resembles the mouth in Edward Munch's The Scream - gaping at a fresh vision of hell - I smiled to myself, as I padded to the shower. Mission accomplished. It was only when I had begun walking for my train and dug out my iPod from its pocket that I saw it was noon and not 8.30am. Once more, the flighty leaf-blowers had ruined my weekend.
I hate leaf-blowers, of course I do - I don't have a garden. But silence is a rare flower, the black orchid of these times, and it's becoming unrecognisable to the human ear. Sound editors add birdsong to an outdoor scene in movies to increase the sense of quiet. They add something to suggest the absence of something, because the sound of nothing is too hard for the human ear to register. Total silence sounds like nothing we've ever heard. It sounds . . . artificial. Listen, and just when you think you've heard it, someone, somewhere will start the engine. Nnnnnbbbbbbzzzzzz . . .