Amid London's honking chorus of chaos, don't be afraid of colliding into a stranger

London is a city of blaring noise and unfeeling strangers. So the cliché goes — until you weigh it against your own experience.

- BY JOE DUNTHORNE

From my desk in east London I can hear the traffic backed up on Dalston Lane. As I listen to it, I like to play the game where I count how many seconds drivers honk their horns. It's not unusual for someone to beep, unbroken, for eight or nine seconds. Every few weeks I hear someone hit double figures and I then jot it down in my notebook. The all-time record, however — documented on a steaming hot Thursday afternoon in 2024 — was 36 seconds. More than half a minute of unbroken rage.

While I will never know the exact circumstances that inspired this record-breaking beep, I can’t help feeling that a honk of that length probably says more about the honker than the honked at. As I see it, only the first few seconds of a honk are explicitly about the specific source of outrage and, after that, the honk becomes increasingly existential. By the time someone has been honking for 20 seconds it feels more like they are honking at God or fate or even at themselves; at the life choices that led them to this moment.

Sometimes a long honk can take on the plaintive feel of a jazz solo, like a screech trumpeter blasting away at a single sombre note, the sound rising high above the houses, an expression of some deep and unshiftable loss. But when I heard the record-breaking honk, it felt like something else entirely, like an attempt to obliterate the known universe by grinding a fist into the centre of the steering wheel — as though they were pressing the red button that will launch the nuclear warheads.

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