Found sound in the graveyard

Dignity PLC - men who run many of the UK's graveyards, including
Downs Cemetery in Brighton

I'm at the allotment with an H1 'handy recorder' to do another week's poems for Radio Reverb's lockdown literature hour. It's a quirky show, with short stories, archival sounds of rain and birds, and me, reading poems from writers in and around the city, plus a short writing prompt at the end.
The producer likes a bit of ambient sound with the poems, as I do and me and the birds get on well.
But I have to choose my moments because even in lockdown, city life is not so quiet. At first there's birdsong - the robin, blackbird, the blue tits nesting in my shed, squirrels in the lindens, sparrows and gulls. There's traffic along the top road and rev of motorbikes because that cut through's an invitation to accelerate with fences on either side and ramshackle sheds. You could be anywhere, it's no-woman's land with its plastic bottle roofs and chairs made into fences.
I'm in the greenhouse wondering if I need to bring the recorder under cover because it's windy. Then in the distance it starts - the strimming - way down near the crematorium chimney belching grey smoke minute by minute. I try and look through the fence but the ivy's grown up. I wander down the path and there they are - men with machines and vans.
The grass has hardly had a chance to go green after the last shaving, but they're revving their strimmers and moving around the gravestones. I can feel my heart. This pack approach. I wander back to the shed and abandon the poem recording. I'll record the strimmer choir. It moves closer. I bend towards the mike, speak the time and date. The men and their machines are unstoppable. Stones, sticks, anything alive is thrown 15 metres one way and another. Nothing survives a petrol strimmer, not a frog, hedgehog, grass snake or slow-worm. Not a chick, a mouse, a squirrel.
(In Bristol, an allotment association has ruled petrol strimmers can only be used between 10 am and midday and only for 30 minutes. "Petrol strimmers emit noise  at a particularly high-pitched frequency which causes noise pollution to many.")
I bow down to Bristol pioneers and wonder about moving. Everyone knows, don't they, that petrol engines are noisy? It was a Texan who invented the petrol powered string strimmer in 1971 and that good ole boy made millions. Before him, you'd scythe and use a variety of hand-tools, or sheep. They were still sending sheep into the graveyards in Surrey in the 80s.
By now the strimmers are deafening, me, the fence, the badger sett, the dead.  I have to leave them to their destruction and wander home, download the recordings and listen back.
Bringing the sound to my desk, I feel the same panic and wonder if there's more to this. I think about beauty, I research sound pollution, I find just one good piece in the Financial Times about noisy garden machinery . The packs of men in harnesses stinking of petrol are rampaging as we speak through parks, allotments, graves, random patches of roadside grass, razing them to dust. They're paid by councils and cemeteries, by owners of large country estates.
I'm thinking about sound as art, found sound, how to bring this to boardrooms, meeting rooms, earbuds, about what it does to the body when it goes all spring and summer. I'm wondering about recording the leaf blower over the road, the power washer, the angle grinder, the electric saw, and putting them on a loop.
But they are already playing in the background at funerals, at weddings, at children's parties, at picnics, during intimate lunches, brave conversations, admissions of love. They drown out dreaming. They're what we've allowed.