So there we were, three old friends meeting up for a chat and a drink more or less spontaneously. They were in town, at relatively short notice. We decided to meet at a pub near where they were staying. Any pub would do. Though we thought better of a preferred one as it was the Saturday of the Ireland-Scotland rugby game and likely to be packed with supporters celebrating our Six Nations Championship win. So we settled on the "quieter-one-next-door". But it wasn't.
We took our seats while one of us went to the counter to order. Very soon it became clear we had unwanted company. Loud, unwanted company. The music system was playing hard rock at full blare. We thought it was just the track and settled down as it played on. And on. Whole paragraphs of chat were drowned in drum rolls. Soon even harmless sentences could barely made it through from speaker to keen ears. It was a "no-contest" and one we weren't going to win.
We decided to move, questioning. Were we getting older or was the music that loud? We agreed that the fault, dear reader, lay not in ourselves but in the music and its stars that we were so underwhelmed. We retreated to a nearby hotel where, we felt it safe to assume, conversation of the usual kind might be possible. And so we began again. One of us went to the counter to order while the remaining two sought out seats. Which was done. But hark? That sound? Like thunder spake? It was omnipresent, persistent, insidious like a mist. No escape.
And I was reminded of two things. The sound torture used by American military at the Abu Ghraib detention centre during the Iraq War in 2003. And of the Muppets. You remember those scenes when Kermit, Ms Piggy and other Muppet characters begin to look up and around trying to find out where the background music to their scene is coming from?
Yes, we three were incarcerated by muzak once again. This time we were determined not to be defeated and conducted our conversation as if in the grip of a Force 10 hurricane.
Muzak, trademark name for piped music coined in the US around 1922 by one George Squier. He developed a system of background "music" for workplaces. inaword@irishtimes.com
