The Espresso machine behind my shoulder hissed like an angry snake. The noise behind it made had a sinister, not to say devilish, suggestion about it. Perhaps, I reflected, most of our contemporary noises carry that implication. The intimidating angry scream of jet planes as they flash across the sky, the slow menacing rumble of a tube train approaching through its tunnel; the heavy road transport that shakes the very foundations of your house… Even the minor domestic noises of today, beneficial in action though they may be, yet carry a kind of alert. The dishwashers, the refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners. “Be careful,” they all seem to say. “I am a genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails…”
A dangerous world — that was it, a dangerous world.