There’s no mood the Thames foreshore can’t improve – ebbs and flows are good for the soul – but the river’s almost too serene at the moment. People are still unofficially treasure-hunting, picking through the tobacco pipes and Tudor tiles that slosh in and out with the tide, but all Port of London mudlarking licenses are on hold. The boats that used to throb through the capital, all tinny tannoys and flashy discos, are anchored and tethered. The helicopter corridor is open for emergencies only, and flight paths from Heathrow to the estuary have fallen silent.

That got me thinking. Though London’s been looking apocalyptic and feeling atomised, it hasn’t been sounding desolate. A week after my Wapping adventure, it even felt a little musical. While cycling home from Hampstead, I saw something as startling as it should have been predictable: on the zebra crossing outside the Abbey Road Studios, no one was trying to re-enact the Beatles’ album cover. In visual terms, it was probably the dullest non-event I’ve ever photographed, but a couplet from the LP looped through my head all the way home. A minor epiphany – pedestrian, even – but I’ve been hearing the city a little differently ever since. It isn’t silent. It’s a soundscape of usually less audible noises – not just blackbirds and goldfinches, but gear changes on a bike and footsteps on a high street – as well as amplified memories. London’s haunted by the hubbub it used to be.

A couple of Sundays ago, I found out just how quiet the river’s become. For want of greater excitement, I clambered down a ladder near Wapping Pier and strolled across the mud with a friend. The tide was exceptionally low and, gazing over waters calm as a Canaletto, I thought of someone else who lives on the opposite shore in Rotherhithe. A telephone call later, she was at her window – and it wasn’t long before our chat turned to shouts. The yelling didn’t last long (too many eavesdroppers), but the fact it happened at all was surprising enough to provoke some online investigations. A sound archivist I then contacted at www.soundsurvey.org.uk was impressed. In days gone by, east London’s lightermen apparently used to identify each other through ‘distinctive ways of whistling, based on the songs of different bird species’, but ours was the first trans-Thames conversation Ian Rawes had ever heard of. A layer of warm air over cold water could have been acting as an acoustic lens, he said, but the exchange also had a simpler explanation: ‘the decline in traffic of all kinds: road, air and river’.

My pretensions to aural sensitivity have had a side-effect: ominous forebodings. Insofar as the lockdown has felt hushed, one reason is that its clang was so deafening. Boris Johnson’s reassertion of leadership has sounded a lot more post-traumatic than optimistic, and his claim last Thursday that we’re ‘past the peak and on the downward slope’ could hardly have been less ringing a forecast of recovery. Views about the way ahead, meanwhile, are thoroughly fragmented. Journalists are reporting, echo chambers are reverberating and everyone’s Zooming, but the semblance of a national conversation barely exists. Even the scapegoat hunters seem to be keeping their voices down: those on my Facebook feed are remarkably unsure whether capitalism, the media, 5G or Bill Gates is most to blame. Meanwhile, the House of Commons itself has dialled down the noise in the process of going semi-virtual. Under a pilot scheme launched on 21 April, no debate can now have more than 120 participants: fifty MPs in the chamber and the rest on video, laggy connections and Zoombombers permitting.

Every severe pandemic in history has left behind brittle institutions and crumbling social networks, and though COVID-19 isn’t as lethal as the Black Death or Spanish Flu, it’ll be similarly damaging. Post-Brexit Britain was hardly a purring political machine, but switching off the engines isn’t going to repair them, and it means that too many huge changes are being disregarded. Senior judges and lawyers are exploring, sotto voce, how best to curtail the right to jury trial. Attitudes towards the EU look frozen, at a time when future cooperation is more urgent than ever. The balance between public health and economic security isn’t being adequately debated, and the tax rises that will have to pay for both aren’t being openly discussed at all.

The streets of London are getting noisier now. I personally clocked a change just days after my trip to Wapping, when a cyclist next to me at a junction in Vauxhall blamed a sudden coughing fit on exhaust fumes. Though I made sure quickly to put great social distance between us, figures put out by Public Health England that same evening said that car journeys across the country were on the increase, and they’ve been rising in London ever since. Revised lockdown rules on Thursday will almost certainly turn up the volume some more. Traffic’s a superficial sign of normalcy though – and it feels as thought the capital’s quiet could give way to levels of discord that are no less intense. But perhaps I’m just being gloomy. Maybe it’s time for another walk along the foreshore . . .