There is a pop-eyed glazier who drives around the streets near my house in a van equipped with a loudspeaker and a range of cartoonish noises: Tarzan's yodel, a neighing horse, a raucous wolf-whistle. He never smiles as he unleashes these but stares blankly ahead, which I suppose is all part of the joke. His sound-effects always startle me and, being so arbitrary and unnecessary, they seem to symbolise the futility of my attempts to avoid the ever increasing din of our world.

At least the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is on the case. It is about to publish a consultation document as the first step towards the creation of a National Noise Strategy. The latest newsletter published by the National Noise Association - a lobbying group uniting several noise protest groups - carries the optimistic strap-line: The Year of the National Noise Strategy.

But Val Weedon, national coordinator of the association, can easily contain her excitement. It is partly that hollow word "consultation", she says. The aviation industry tends to hold consultations immediately before some new hike in aircraft numbers. This is so that it can say to people who subsequently point out that their lives have been wrecked by the din: "Now hold on a minute, we had a very full consultation before the changes were brought in."

"Do you think this is the noisiest country in the world?" I ask her, as we sit sipping tea in her City office, safely cocooned in double glazing. "Well, there's India," she says. "People say that's very noisy, but it's certainly a thought . . . we're definitely up there."

I have known Weedon for some time, and she and I share the same scars. We have been marked for life - our nerves permanently undermined - by a noise problem. In my case it was barking dogs in a neighbouring backyard. I am still proud of the plan I developed for murdering them: lobbing an ice cube packed with rat poison into their water bucket. I didn't do it; instead I became one of the half a million people a year who move home because of neighbour noise. When on my last day in the flat I checked under the bed, I looked with a mixture of rage and shame at all the wax earplugs that had slipped down between mattress and headboard.

With Weedon it was music. "In the 80s I was living in Abbey Wood [in south-east London] and the woman next door wouldn't stop playing records at top volume."

Was one track played particularly often? This is sadistic of me because I know the answer, but I want to see the look on her face as she replies: "Yes - All Around the World by Lisa Stansfield, over and over and over again. Weedon moved house and founded, in 1991, the Peace and Quiet Campaign, with Spike Milligan as patron. "Spike," she recalls, "had a sign on his front door that said, 'It is possible to close the door without slamming. Try it, and see how clever you are.'" Milligan hated noise, but loved sound. While making The Goons, he once filled his sock with custard and threw it against a wall to test a theory about what it would sound like. Noise is unwanted sound and technological advances - as they are generally known - ensure that we have far too much of it, with far too little opportunity for redress.

The main anti-noise legislation is the Environmental Protection Act of 1990. "It's pretty useless really because its definition of 'noise nuisance' is so hard to satisfy," says Weedon. Only about one in 40 complaints made under the act lead to a noise abatement order. Your neighbour with the hair-trigger car alarm can in theory also be subject to an Asbo should your local authority and the police deem it appropriate, but that hardly ever happens. So will the consultation will lead to new legislation? Weedon sighs and says: "I doubt it."

The fear is that the consultation will merely produce windy guidelines rather than hard, punitive action. It is to be carried on as Defra concludes the drawing up of noise maps for Britain, an EU initiative designed to identify the noisiest parts of the country. I can't help thinking that I could the tell EU commissioners that in about three minutes over a cup of coffee, which would save them a good deal of money. Both these initiatives seem so cumbersome and elliptical that you want to tell their earnest instigators: "Just stand still and listen, for God's sake."

This is a country in which many shop-workers were exposed to Jingle Bells up to 300 times a day during the recent festive season. And guess how many mobile phones we own per 100 people? I love this one: 108, second only to garrulous Italy, where the figure is 123. If our ancestors could be revived and returned to their former habitations they would be deafened. Research conducted at the Sheffield Hallam University discovered that, overall, Sheffield was twice as loud in 2001 as it had been in 1991, and that some parts of the city were 10 times louder.

The south of England is worse, though, courtesy of Heathrow, the biggest airport in the world, and one of the worst-positioned. For the noisephobic individual, the danger is of finding yourselves in the noise tracks of the planes. In the easterly wind - which obtains for 30% of the time - planes take off over London and come in to land over Berkshire. London perhaps gets the best of that arrangement because departing aircraft are supposedly confined to "noise preference routes" (as if anyone prefers it).

In the westerly wind, however, which obtains for 70% of the time, the planes descend in billowing curves over a wide swathe of north and south London before turning and following the river westwards. In the process, they fill the sky with a near constant howling and these incoming routes are determined solely by the requirements of air traffic control. As an official at National Air Traffic Services once airily informed me, "The tracks of these planes are not related to points on the ground" - which is a shame, since most of us do live on the ground.

Standing foursquare against this evil is John Stewart, who shares an office with Weedon, and is a man I often think ought to implode from the sheer rightness of his opinions. He is the chairman of the UK Noise Association; also of Transport 2000, which promotes sustainable transport, and of HACAN Clearskies, which protests against the Heathrow operators' apparent belief that they own the sky.

Stewart used to live in Clapham, south London, and the deal there - as with much of London - is that you are in earshot of a descending aircraft every few minutes. "It was the planes that forced me to move," says Stewart, "but the noise of a nearby laundry also contributed. For years, it was fine, and they installed these new, much louder machines. On at 10 to 7 in the morning, off at 20 to 10 at night."

He sits back and grins. "Do you know," he says, "that the transport white paper of 2003 makes us the only country in the world that is actually planning for - actually embracing - a three-fold increase in aviation?"

The third runway proposed for Heathrow will take care of the few remaining oases of quiet in the capital: High Street Kensington, Notting Hill, Holland Park. No Defra noise plan is going stop that. (Mass civil disobedience, uniting anti-noise and anti-carbon protesters might just.) And, by the way, if anyone is reading this and congratulating themselves on living outside London, I say: "Don't gloat, because you're next." Just yesterday BAA announced plans for a £2.3bn expansion of Stansted in Essex, including a new runway and terminal. By 2030, it expects the airport to be handling 68 million people, as opposed to last year's 24 million.

Last year, the Ashridge estate, billed on the National Trust website as "lovely country parkland along the ridge of the Chiltern Hills" succumbed to the expansion of Luton airport. It includes the village of Ayot St Lawrence, where George Bernard Shaw lived and wrote in a shed in the garden. You couldn't write more than a paragraph there now without some shuddering crate looming overhead. In Bristol, Brandon Hill park - a lunchtime haven for office workers - recently lost its quiet sky to the expansion of Bristol airport, which dealt with four and half million passengers in 2004, and five and half million in 2006. If I lived in the Wirral, which is increasingly blighted by the growth of John Lennon Liverpool airport, where passenger numbers increased by 30% last year, I would find the slogan of that airport rather disturbingly abstracted: Above us only sky. (Executives at Liverpool JL would do better to be guided by another line from the same song: No hell below us.)

It would be nice to swing away from aeroplanes and relate the quiet virtues of rail. Research does show that people are less bothered by train noise per se than by noise produced by cars and planes, but our government promotes aviation and road transport at the expense of trains, and the trains themselves are not as quiet as they ought to be. Take the train horn that was introduced across the network five years ago. Peter Wakeham of The Noise Abatement Society (NAS), describes it as, "An obscenity. The horn makes a noise of between 110 and 120 decibels. A thunderclap is 120 decibels. It can be heard three miles away."

But Wakeham is just getting into his stride: "The horn is being sounded in some places five, six, seven times an hour. There are children on tranquillisers because of it, and we know of an old lady who tried to kill herself because of the noise. We have had at least 17,000 complaints."

The Noise Abatement Society was founded in 1959 by John Connell, who died in 1998, a hero to noisephobics. For example, he invented - in the sense of suggesting the idea to a manufacturer - the rubber dustbin lid. Today, the new train horn is the main front on which the NAS does battle, and its efforts have resulted in the formation of a rail industry body called the Train Horns Steering Group, which has introduced well-meaning but complicated proposals to restrict use of the horn, so that the wretched object is now a bureaucratic headache as well as an assault on the public. "We ought not to be fiddling with the regulations about when and where it can be used," says Wakeham. "We need a new train horn."

Trollope wrote his novels sitting on trains. You couldn't do that today because the "train manager" clears his throat and makes a speech every time the train leaves a "station stop".

The Swiss Railways run perfectly with no announcements; ours run badly with constant announcements, and I think there is a lesson there. The Paris Metro is also more or less silent, whereas a feature of my tube journeys is the clashing of not two but three announcements. The first might be "This train terminates at Morden via Bank", which is ungrammatical. The second might be "Remember to touch in and touch out with your Oyster card on every journey." As to that, well, I think we might just have got the point by now, since the announcement has been played every five minutes for three years. And these two are often complimented by a third announcement from the British Transport Police: "Thieves will lose no opportunity to remove your bags and personal belongings . . ." which always reminds me of that sketch in which Peter Cook plays a thick copper who pronounces: "This robbery has all the hallmarks of having been committed by thieves."

"This is the information age," a spokesman for Central Trains glumly reminded me when I asked why his company had installed televisions on some of its Cross City services between Redditch and Litchfield via Birmingham New Street. Passengers are exposed to adverts (from which Central derives revenue), the news, short documentaries and something chillingly referred to as "entertainment content". "We had some complaints at the beginning but now we have 70% passenger approval," said the spokesman. I promised I would quote the figure, and I do so in a state of depression, and not without noting that C2C, the ludicrously named Essex operator, also experimented with TVs on its trains, but decided against adopting them because of overwhelmingly negative passenger reaction.

C2C suffers from the British curse - stemming perhaps from the great length of our history - of wanting to appear youthful. It describes itself as "young, innovative, dynamic", and I suspect its TV experiment arose from making the equation between "young" and "loud". I seem to remember that, aged 18 or so, I would sometimes walk into the crowded, cacophonous pubs of central York and ask the landlord to turn the music up. I am now 44 and most people I know who object to noise are at least my age, which raises the question: is this an inter-generational battle?

Nigel Rodgers, of the anti-piped music campaign, Pipedown, says: "There's a presumption that young people will want piped noise all the time, but I don't think it's generational so much as biological. The older you are, the more bothered you are by the increased stress, raised blood pressure and psychological problems that it causes."

Two years ago, on a bus in Middlesbrough, I heard some horrible pop music made far worse by being squeezed through a tiny aperture. It was like the sound of the worst sort of badly tuned 70s tranny magnified tenfold. I turned around to see the face of a teenage boy, whose expression said, "You don't like this, do you? And you're too scared to do anything about it." Only slowly did it dawn on me that another technological leap had occurred: it had evidently become possible to download music on to a mobile phone, and to upload it into the ears of people trying to think on a bus.

I should say here that Transport for London is about to launch a poster campaign about this menace, and that the Liberal Democrat MP, Bob Russell, has put down an early-day motion asking the government to require mobile phone operators to introduce a code of practice with the aim of reducing noise nuisance. And let me perpetuate this feeble strain of hope by mentioning that Lord Beaumont, the Green peer, has introduced a bill to curtail the playing of piped music in hospitals. Pipedown campaigns about this, and its literature includes testimony from Sheila, a former patient of Western General hospital, Edinburgh, who was subjected to piped pop while having chemotherapy, and Ray, who, after noisy experiences as a patient at St James University Hospital, Leeds wrote: "Heaven, please hear me, and let my end come without music or TV."

Silence is now regarded as a lapse, an omission that must be rectified, and the danger, according to Nigel Rodgers, is that we are all becoming addicted to noise as a result.

I can understand this because I am sort of addicted to it myself. I often travel to Manchester on Virgin trains, and sit clenched and waiting for the first passenger to go to the toilet and mistake the alarm button for the flush button, thereby triggering a strident reversing-lorry tone, and the Dalek voice that proclaims every minute and a half, "Attention, train crew - passenger emergency alarm activated".

When it starts up - and it has never failed to do so in the dozens of times I've used the service - I think, ah, there it is. And I sit back and almost relax because the fact is that silence is so tenuous and likely to be interrupted in the Britain of 2007 that, frankly, we might as well have the bloody noise.

· To apply for a copy of the Defra consultation document, email noise@defra.gsi.gov.uk

Pipe down: how to make your world quieter

Given that we can't all just move to Northumberland National Park (the most tranquil place in England, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, where sheep out-number people by five to one) here is a guide to tackling your sound problems one by one.

Noisy streets

Double glazing is so passé: for up-to-the-minute noise reduction, you want the fenestral equivalent of turning it up to 11. Not triple glazing, but secondary glazing. "That is where you add an extra window pane four inches or so inside the existing double-glazed window," says sound proofing guru Gary Peskett of Custom Audio Designs. If that's not enough, consider fitting a different thickness of glass from that in the original window (different widths cut out different sound waves) and even laminated glass. For those unfortunate enough to live under a flight path, Peskett recommends extra-heavy quilting insulation rather than ordinary fibreglass - "something weighing around 8kg per square metre".

Noisy neighbours

If you are a flat dweller tormented by the sound of your upstairs neighbours, consider putting in a "secondary resilient ceiling" - essentially a floating floor that Peskett claims can cut noise by half. You can perform a similar trick on dividing walls. Raw materials cost around £30-40 per square metre, according to Peskett. What about the garden? The National Noise Association's jaunty "Quiet Guide: Tips for a Quieter Life" suggests you plant a dense barrier of trees to absorb sound.

Your commute

In the olden days, people were plagued by the actual plague; nowadays, it is the tinny thrum of other people's iPods. Unfortunately, according to Brad Warwick of www.allearplugs.com, not even the world's most sophisticated ear plugs can silence outside noise completely. He says: "Earplugs generally reduce noise by up to 35dB depending on the material and how the earplug is applied. The most effective are those that are used inside the ear canal and can usually attenuate noise to around 29-34dB for standard soft foam earplugs." This isn't desperately impressive when you consider that the average conversation is conducted at between 50 and 60dB. Warwick adds that to block out most noise, you could get custom-made plugs made to fit your own ear canal.

But what if you want to listen to your own iPod (keeping the volume down, of course) without being interrupted by the train driver's endless announcements? Clare Newsome, editor of What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision magazine, says: "Everyone knows that the best thing you can do with the headphones you get free is to bin them." In What Hi-Fi tests, the Shure brand of noise-isolating headphones has fared well: see www.shure.com. Newsome recommends spending at least £100.

The office

Even if you work in a library, you may still be driven batty by the hum of computers and stationery-crazy colleagues. But there is a solution. The National Noise Association (NNA) recommends www.quietpc.com, a company that specialises in noise elimination for computers. And you consider switching your sticky tape to 3M Low Noise Tape: "Pulls off smoothly from the roll without that unpleasant screech . . . your colleagues will definitely appreciate it," says the ever considerate NNA.