Rachel Johnson’s Golden Oldies

Regular readers of this column will be wearily aware of my doomed attempts to play my own music collection at home. (Some good news there, just in: after protracted and detailed study of the Brennan user guide – and many thanks to the Oldie correspondent who pointed me in that direction – I can now at least play an album I have already downloaded.)

My continuing failure to take back control on the home audio front does not end there, for it has led to my husband ‘discovering’ BBC Radio 6. This is a bit like having the Brennan on shuffle but – and this is a big but – not locked onto your own pre-loaded playlist but a random one, compiled by someone you’ve never got on with. This poor state of play is amplified when I leave the house, as then I am assailed by others’ ‘listening choices’. Aural torture. Let us count the ways.

I take Ubers. Whenever I get into the waiting Prius, the driver is fiddling with his satnav app while the radio is tuned fuzzily to some Afpak rap radio or similar. I remain very calm.

‘Is there any chance you could play Radio Four?’ I ask pleasantly (speech radio is safer, in the sense of at least not being ear-bleeding). The drivers invariably have no idea what I am talking about; so I assist them to retune to 93.5 FM – not hiding my amazement that they are British, yet unaware of the station, one of the great monuments of national life.

Obviously, I can’t shop in the jingletills season between October and December because of incessant Christmas music. I can’t be in rooms with young people playing games on their phones or Xboxes because of the BGM (background music). I try to take the stairs at the BBC to avoid unnecessary absorption of elevator music (BBC music stations play in all lifts).

I recognise that this wallpaper of unwelcome wraparound sound is society’s way of telling me (and you) that you’re too old for this coffee shop, department store or restaurant, and therefore serves some sort of purpose. But things came to a head a few weeks ago.

I’d checked into a deluxe wellness retreat in Wiltshire to recover from my recent Celebrity Big Brother experience. I’d entered a room, stripped and scrambled onto a sort of plinth, where I was tenderly swaddled. The base of the plinth was lowered, so I could lie suspended in salt water in complete darkness and ‘heal’. ‘Thirty minutes in the flotation tank is like four hours’ deep sleep,’ I was told. As the door clicked shut and the therapist left and there was no escape, I became aware of it: tinkling, generic spa music – designed no doubt to transport my plodding thoughts into some magical, sylvan glade – and playing at a volume too loud to ignore.

‘Help!’ I called out, thrashing and sloshing about in the saline. ‘Help!’ But it was too late. Sadly, it was not the day the Muzak died. It went on. And on.

As a result of my trauma, I intend to leave a large legacy to the Pipedown campaign group (set up to reduce unwanted music in public life) and hope others might follow my example.