Dialogue: Sniff, sniff - and turn off the music

By JOE BENNETT

"Wake up and smell the coffee" has become a catch-cry of everyone too idle or timid to think for themselves, but in a moment of unusual empathy - one tries not to do empathy, of course, but at times, well it just sweeps in and there's nothing that a natural empath like myself can do about it - I have just seen the aptness of the phrase. I have, in short, just woken up and, well, smelled the coffee.

Nothing remarkable about that, of course, except that it hasn't happened for the worst part of a month because I've been afflicted with some viral delight which has produced tankerloads of phlegm and turned the world into a place of starkly reduced sensory data - muffled hearing, all food tasting of polystyrene and no sense of smell.

But now, this morning, three weeks and four zillion painkillers later, I slide from my pit, activate the coffee machine and find suddenly that I can smell the stuff. Calloo callay oh frabjous day and all that. The world is sapid once more and it's all right, so much all right indeed that I'm feeling venomous, and there's nothing like the renewal of spite, gall and misanthropy to indicate a man's return to well-being.

Do they still make children play that dreadful game in which they all have to pretend to be significant historical characters in a sinking balloon and each little brat has to argue that he - Einstein or whatever - shouldn't be tossed out to save the balloon because if he fell to his death the world would be cruelly deprived? I expect so. So good for teaching the little darlings the prime virtues of puffing their own merits and denigrating others.

Well of course the game's wasted on children. They know too little. But as one gets older it makes more sense, and the number of candidates one would like to toss out of the balloon and thus prevent from putting their stamp on the planet becomes legion.

Yes, it's a waste of time. The omelet's made and the eggs are broken, but I can't see that there's much harm in us oldies sitting on the porch in our worm-riddled rocking chairs grinding our gums and indulging in grubby fantasies.

And the bloke I'd most like to see tossed from several thousand feet and spattered is whoever it was - Marconi, Edison, I don't know but I do care - who discovered that it was possible to record music.

If music were a rarity rather than an ubiquity I might even like the stuff.

It ought to be good. Plenty of people are keen to point out that the word "music" derives from "muse" and is, oh dear me, the most direct form of expression of feeling available to mankind, like a spigot banged straight into the barrel of emotion, a form of expression unpolluted by the necessity for meaning. And, yes, I can see all that.

Time was when life was tough but silent. The medieval village was a quiet place save for the screams of people dying from nasties that science hadn't got round to finding a cure for. But then a few times a year there would be special cause to celebrate or grieve and they'd wheel out the blind fiddler and the pipe blower and the lute strummer and the peasants would all be seized by the magic of music.

The other day a bloke I know who plays in some sort of bow-tie-and-dinner-jacket orchestra hauled out his viola in his own front room and played a few bars of something mournful and the room was instantly drenched with sobbing. That was good and potent and lovely.

But Marconi or whoever put paid to that sort of thing. By making music available everywhere, everywhen he dumped on its wonder. Look what he's spawned. Muzak. Unspeakable boutiques. The Beatles. The subliminal tinkling on aeroplanes designed to stop you screaming. The stuff they play while you're on the phone to the bank and waiting for Mr Dogbreath to stop scratching his crotch or fondling his secretary.

Cloth-eared teenagers who have gathered to make noise because the young like noise and who are promoted by wrinkled sadsacks whose time has gone but who have learned how to make money by exploiting sex and what they are pleased to call youth culture, as if that phrase were not by definition an oxymoron. Walkmans.

Imagine all of that gone. In its stead silence. And if you wanted to hear music you would have to go to somewhere where music was played by people who knew how to play it. It would be exactly like coming round from three weeks of viral misery and smelling the coffee.

But it won't happen. We've got permanent flu.