The tuneless busker outside my office and why it’s life’s little irritants that really drive us mad

THE story is told of Arnold Palmer (in the version I first heard when I was 12) that the great golfer was lining up for a crucial putt at the U.S. Open when a gigantic Amtrak train came roaring past the green, yards from where he stood, blowing its deafening horn.

The spectators were startled out of their wits, but the master was utterly unperturbed. Without pausing in his stroke as the train screamed by, he holed the long shot for a birdie. His caddy was astounded, asking: ‘How come the train didn’t put you off?’

Palmer (if it was he) looked at him, perplexed, and said: ‘What train?’

Of course, it is possible that this anecdote is an urban myth. But there must surely be a grain of truth in its moral — that a capacity for total concentration on the task in hand is a prerequisite of excellence in many areas of human endeavour.

Now, I flatter myself that, like Arnold Palmer, I have a remarkable talent for blocking out distractions — a gift, I have to admit, which is by no means rare among members of my sex.

Indeed, my dear wife will testify that when I’m doing the crossword or merely ruminating on the mysteries of the human condition, she can ask me at least five times to do something about the water pouring through the ceiling from the bathroom before I notice that anyone is speaking to me.

It’s the same at work. When I’m thinking about how to phrase a sentence, colleagues can jabber away about momentous developments in the world, crucial to the subject I’m writing about, and not a word sinks in.

Snapped

I’ve even sat through fire drills, oblivious of the piercing alarm, until wardens have had to shake me by the shoulders and tell me to join the pointless procession down the stairs to the street.

Ah, but once I’ve been alerted to an irritant, that’s quite a different matter. From that moment on, I’m distracted to the point of madness, and find it impossible to concentrate on anything else.

Take the busker who has stationed himself, rain and shine, on the pavement four storeys below my office window since I arrived at the Daily Mail, ten years ago this May.

For the first nine years and eight months or so, he barely impinged upon my consciousness. Yes, I was dimly aware of a clarinet burbling away quietly in the background. But I can’t pretend it bothered me at all.

That was until a couple of weeks ago, when a normally mild-mannered office-mate suddenly snapped, shouting: ‘My God, Tom, how can you stand it?’ ‘How can I stand what?’ ‘How can you stand that bloody tune, over and over and over again?’

Until that moment, I hadn’t properly registered that since May 2006, I must have heard Acker Bilk’s Stranger On The Shore played, not very competently, at least 15 times every working day of my life for weeks on end.

I was like one of those people living under the Heathrow flightpath, who have grown so used to the appalling din that they simply don’t notice how insufferable it is.

But ever since my colleague drew my attention to it, I’ve howled with inner anguish and rage every time that wretched busker has sent those far-too-familiar notes wafting up from the street. Indeed, I’ve felt sorely tempted to pour a bucket of boiling oil out of my window on to the fiendish clarinettist beneath, just to shut him up.

So it is that I feel great sympathy with Sarah Smith and her husband Simon, of Little Baddow, Essex. They are the couple who have attracted much ridicule this week after dragging their neighbour through the courts in protest against the ‘intolerable’ gurgling sound coming from the water filtration system in his garden pond.

All right, the pond in question is a full 80ft away from the Smiths’ £800,000 house. And as the court heard, the noise made by neighbour Soroush Ebrahimi’s filtration system is not very loud. It’s 50 decibels to be precise — more like the hum of a domestic fridge than the roar of a Boeing 747.

But as we’ve all experienced at some time or other, the minor irritations are often the worst.

Gurgling

I can all too well imagine the Smiths, sitting out in their garden on a balmy September evening back in 2013, shortly after Mr Ebrahimi installed his algaeremoving pump, with its two-inch pipe.

Sarah turns to Simon and says: ‘Do you hear that funny noise?’ ‘What noise, darling?’ ‘That gurgling sound, coming from the Ebrahimis’ garden. Isn’t it annoying?’

‘Oh, yes, I think I can hear it. I see what you mean. Very annoying.’

From that moment on, their grievance becomes an obsession. Despite all their neighbours’ attempts to appease them — Celia Ebrahimi, a retired headteacher, says that all through the summer, as requested, they switched off the pump during the day — there comes a point where the Smiths notice nothing but that infernal gurgling. Blow trumpets inches from their ears, and all they can hear is the glug, glug, glug coming from next door.

And so it ended in court, with the Smiths a wallet-crunching £4,000 out of pocket after Chelmsford magistrates refused their request for an order under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 to end the nuisance.

I can see all this must have been very upsetting and unpleasant for everyone involved. But ever the Polyanna, I like to see it as yet more evidence that we live in a blessed land, in which people have nothing more serious to get worked up about — and proper grievances are so thin on the ground that we have to invent them.

Indeed, I often wonder what Syrian families, bombed out of their homes by Vladimir Putin and threatened with crucifixion by Islamic State neanderthals, must make of a land like ours.

We are a country, after all, in which the Left thinks it’s hideously cruel to label children as boys or girls, instead of allowing for the possibility that they may be ‘gender fluid’. It’s a nation where, until recently, campaigners were screaming blue murder about the ban on same-sex marriage. It’s a land where the police, apparently with few real crimes to investigate, devote colossal resources to following up fantasy allegations against celebrities long dead.

Scandal

What can the abandoned young men and women of the eurozone, in areas where youth unemployment is running at 60 and 70 per cent, make of a Britain where feminists are concerned only about the injustice of the ‘gender pay gap’? (I note they don’t say so much about the ‘gender work gap’, which sees the NHS training many more women doctors for the same return on its investment as it gets from male medical students.)

What can starving children in Africa make of pampered, mumsy Emma Thompson, working herself up into a self-righteous thespian lather to voice her ‘profound objections’ to plans for opening a Tesco Express two miles from her Hampstead home (when she’s not telling Germans that her homeland, which showered her with blessings, is a miserable dump)?

What, come to that, can they think of a country in which so many believe it’s a shameful scandal that charities have set up food-banks to dish out grub to the not-soneedy? Or of the pop diva Adele, who says she ‘cried pretty much all day’ for no better reason than a problem with the sound system at the Grammy Awards?

On all this evidence, I suspect, they will think this is a country with precious few real problems. And what is so alarming is that this belief seems to be shared by a generation of British politicians who seem to think wars and genuine economic hardships are things that happen only to other nations.

As I look around this desperately volatile world, from the eurozone to the Middle East, Russia, empire-building China and maniacal North Korea, I wish I could be so sure. I pray that I’m wrong, but I have an awful fear that our young may soon have very much worse things to worry about than a neighbour’s gurgling pond.