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I’m writing this with headphones in, sitting at my desk on Old Queen Street. Please don’t tell Debrett’s. Apparently listening to headphones in the office is a huge faux pas, akin to cutting camembert with a fish knife. The company’s etiquette adviser, Liz Wyse, told the Times: ‘If you work in an open-plan office where there is frequent conversation and interchange of ideas between colleagues, do not wear AirPods or headphones.’  The worst thing that happens when zoned out on David Bowie is that a colleague has to wave near your eye line We will, she assures us, be ‘much more valuable staff members’ if we instead choose to ‘tune

One of the great pluses of electric cars is that they are so quiet. The driver’s seat is a peaceful place to be, although safety regulations dictate they must emit artificial noise to alert pedestrians to their presence when travelling below certain speeds. Now that steps have been taken to prevent the visually impaired from falling victim to their silent menace – a subject that for some reason provokes laughter, but they have killed people, so they now make a friendly bleep – another sense can be spared the intrusions of the combustion engine. Isn’t silence, or your own choice of music or whatever, the preferable accompaniment to driving? But