Your next-door-neighbours are having another one of their long, heated, high-pitched and highly emotional arguments; an intercity train thunders past at the end of the garden leaving a flurry of leaves and a trail of noise in its wake; a young child, all too evidently lacking any of the talent that the rest of Britain has allegedly got, forces a violin to make noises it wasn’t built to make and the banging and slamming and drilling and clanging that has been going on for months in the house next door shows no signs of abating.
Are these familiar scenes or do you know of any even more upsetting, maddening or horrific ones? What can you do if you find out that the walls of the flat that you have moved into seem to be made of rice paper, and what do you need to know, and do, to soundproof your inadequately insulated home and keep the noise and din from blighting your mornings, days and nights?
The expression “My Home is My Castle” captures like no other the importance of having a home and what this means to the people who own such a home as well as the people who live in it. A home is a source of comfort, of cherished memories, and of accomplishment and pride – and it is a source of strength. You can rest and recuperate at home and you can enjoy the peace that surrounds you in your own four walls.
When was the last time you boarded a plane? Do you recall experiencing any uncomfortable side effects during or after a long-distance flight? No, nothing dramatic like a sudden bout of amnesia and being blissfully unaware of who you are. Or a panic attack because you were strangely unable to peel off your graduated compression stockings. No, something less disturbing and something more familiar like a sore throat perhaps, a stuffy nose, dry, irritated, eyes and itchy skin or raw, red knuckles and chapped lips and hands? 
There are a fair number of sites and places where you would expect to find one of our multipurpose, pop-up 
But there are several hardened species which can flourish as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Antarctica. Of the 30,000 or so different species of orchid known to man there is a small number which are deemed especially collectable. Rothschild’s Slipper, an orchid that takes as long as 15 years to grow, can fetch prices upwards of 5000 US dollars per stem.
Welcome to the 21st century! You only have to look back in history – and not very far back at that – to see that there comes a time when many objects and products which we have grown accustomed or even attached to have had to make way for new inventions which were not only far more convenient, easier to use and much more useful – they simply knocked their predecessors into a cocked hat!
