Another news item – more local, this time. A couple in Wrington, Somerset, recently bought Priory House, opposite the Church. Wrington Church has – or had – a chiming clock that boinged away every 15 minutes, morning, noon and night, and had done for the last 100 years. The couple objected to the noise, complained to the Council, and the Council declared it a noise nuisance. Hence, chimes no longer wring out in Wrington.
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I bought a house immediately opposite a church, I’d expect there to be bells. Assuming that they actually viewed the house before buying, then they must have known that there were bells. Oh, dear, I can’t sleep. Instead of silencing the bells, the Council should have said: “You knew there were bells, so tough sh*t.” Maybe they could have supplied a job lot of earplugs.
On this basis, I expect lots of court cases where people living beside the M5 successfully petition to have the motorway closed each night from 11 pm to 7 am so they can get back some of the rural peace they had before the road was built. Go for it, I say! Oh, and we’ll shut the railway and the airport, too. Trains and planes are a lot more annoying than church bells. Come to think of it, why not shoot all the Rooks too? Having lived near a rookery, the amount of early-morning noise they make definitely amounts to a nuisance…