The mad woman next door, Lydia, always keeps a row of eggs well past their sell-by-date on her window sill just in case on the beat of a butterfly's wings (which is all it takes), the demented shriek of a car alarm should happen, within her range, to break what's left of the urban peace. Living in the centre of London, she has developed quite a good elbow.

Motor-bike couriers, pizza deliveries, and post office vans are, hypothetically, also on Lydia's hit list but as far as I know she has not yet managed to make an egg, not even hard-boiled, travel at the speed of light. I suspect she'd very much like to.

But my own maniacal, if less athletic loathing for the internal combustion engine and all its attendant cacophonies was subverted a little time ago by the ostentatiously anti-p.c. (politically correct) suggestion that the racket in London had in all probability been worse before the advent of the infernal machine. Fortunately for my m.o. (moral outrage), some recent research into 'noise' files at the Public Record Office would seem, however, to reject this flippant exercise in contumelious r.d. (rational discourse).

But some things it must be said, never change. A 1911 Home Office file on traffic noise (HO45/13306/204355) included a letter to The Times of 8 August, which had this to say concerning a favourite institution.
 

Then there is the Post Office, always an incorrigible offender, not only because ...