Being a lexicon of poor half-lies produced by a disinformed foreign volunteer living and working a year in Thailand

As part of a year-long working holiday in Thailand from autumn 1995 to summer 1996, Tamlan Dipper compiled an encyclopedic diary of the locale. We've decided to serialise it for your delectation. This month:

Noise (see also Karaoke)

Noise in Thailand is less of a wave and more like a vast energy-field, surrounding us, permeating us, bindign the country together. I say that it surrounds us because a number of people around us are obsessed with their sound-systems and have huge - unfeasably large - PA systems: purely for their private use. 'Private' is a gross misnomer. Well, possibly for private use, but certainly for public reception. Other people have small personal stereos which they keep on maximum volume. Some people have neither, and simply park their cars in the street outside their houses and use the stereo from there for their living-room. Failing all this it will be sen as necessary to bang drums, and wail very loudly.

As an alternative, the sports stadium 2km away may drown out everything with its truly formaidable PAs.

I say permeating, because noise forms an integral part of all Thai occasions. Noise is important for important things. All the festivals include several wheeled kettle-drum things, gongs, and endless firecrackers. A monk's initiation ceremony, for example, is held by everyone forming a convoy of several trucks plus people on foot, and parading around the area for about two hours, whooping, clapping, playing drums and making speeches over the tannoy, to an accompanying full band.

Noise is important for trivial things, and it's a sorry party or outing indeed which does not have a grinning freak hammering at a set of bongo drums completely at odds to anything else which is happening. Noise makes anything into an occasion; everyone competes; a simple gauge of the import of a ceremony is the noise that it produces.

I say that it binds us together becxasue in a curious way it does. It is a practical impossibility to avoid the boistrous annoyance, the fulsome evidence of lives going on around you, and this can be rather comforting. It's as if the community wanted you to feel included. If - for instance - someone should be moving some instruments, the movers will invariably set up the whole band in the back of the ubiquitous) pick-up and bang out some songs at full volume the length of the trip.

I suppose that you can imagine what it's like on a bad day, with a funeral (with wailing PA) running from five to seven a.m. Succeed this by scooter-motors and roosters, strung throughout othe day plus miscellaneous shouts and traffic noise. Followed, in the mid-afternoon by several stereos and a monk's initiation. Then later, someone's party (probably the man on the corner with the 3-kilowatt rig (true)), which will carry on into the night leaving only the incessant barking of the stray dogs, and cicadas.

Well, maybe you can't imaging it. Curiously, a lot of it doesn't register any more, until I listen.

I have only heard silence once since I came to Thailand. I was in the national park near Kamphaeng with some friends and I had walked off by myself. I was so awed by the almost physical presence of the silence that I stood absolutely still for what felt like ten minutes, testing it. When I did move, I was surprised to find that a small grass lizard had crawled onto my shoe to be in the sun. Then some people arrived on scooters and broke the silence.

If maturity is 'discovering that the volume knob turns both ways', then I'd say that - on balance - the Thais should not be given the keys to the house, and should probably have to be back in by ten.