I HAVE just suffered an assault on my eardrums.

It came not at a rock concert or in a nightclub but my local B&Q, where the piped in-store music was so loud I had to ask an assistant the same question three times.

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A customer heard me complaining and sent me to the ladies, where the same music was playing only ten times louder. “I thought I was in a disco,” she told me.

It is not just that store which blasts out music at a level to drive you mad. Cafes sometimes crank up the volume so that you can barely hear your companions speak.

The last time I ate out with friends we had to move tables because the din from the overhead speaker was so bad.

And while not loud, background music is always present in supermarkets.

Doesn’t everyone need peace and quiet? I would have thought that even noisy people needed it at some point. It allows you to relax in a way that you can’t possibly do when surrounded by a wall of sound.

But, more and more, it seems that people don’t require or value quiet.

We live in such a noisy world that we really don’t know what silence is. Even at home, when we think it is quiet, there is usually something audible in the background, be it the drone of traffic or the hum of a refrigerator.

Last weekend I sat in the garden to read the paper, but was plagued by the clatter of a hedge cutter, followed by the roar of the mower, and, later, the shrill whirr of a drill. I told my husband to end the racket and join me, but he just glared and picked up a hammer.

There’s no escaping it. In the street there are people chatting on mobile phones or into hidden microphones.

I confess to being allergic to other people’s music. When my daughters are at home I must bark the words “Turn that down!” at least a dozen times, creating even more noise.

It is tempting to believe that noise is a modern problem, but, more than a century ago, the writer Thomas Carlyle was driven to build himself a ‘well deafened room’ on the roof of his Chelsea home to escape his neighbour’s pianos and the sound of metal-wheeled carts in the street.

I suffer from tinnitus, so I am never completely free from noise. And, because of this, background noise for me is sometimes a blessing. But we urgently need to tone it down.