The biggest gap between the generations, I'm beginning to think, is not that we oldies save string and have spent half our lives trying to curl our hair, while the young use hair straighteners and save nothing; nor that they feel at home with computers and enjoy multiple relationships with people they've never seen; nor even that we think the word "cool" relates to temperature and "wicked" to badness. It is in our attitude to sound.

A few months ago there was a lot of controversy about whether it was, or wasn't, ethical to play a noise excruciating to teenagers, which only they could hear, to keep them away from shops that thought such teenagers put off proper customers. I reckon it's time for a protest about sounds that keep older people away: loud, incessant and unnecessary music.

You see a garment in a shop window that looks attractive - it might be a jacket with no age tag, or something the young would wear as a dress but any of us could wear as a top over trousers, say - and you venture in, only to meet a barrage of pop music that puts you off the whole idea. Or you find a hairdresser who actually does what you ask, but you don't go back because the music is enough to make your hair stand on end anyway. Topshop is bad enough, but Abercrombie & Fitch, whose gentlemanly name suggests at most a bit of quiet Bach in the background, is even worse.

The Times calls its classical and pop pages Sounds, presumably on the grounds that those who like the one wouldn't consider the other to be music at all. But it's not just the type of sound that's divisive: it's the amount of it that we can stand. It's well known that if there's one thing that really puts the wind up older air travellers, it is the sound of the muzak that is supposed to soothe and reassure them but actually makes you think the wings have fallen off. I've yet to meet anyone my age who is quite happy to be put endlessly on hold, so long as a repetitive tape pours music into their resentful ears. Nor anyone who can explain why young people talking on their mobiles on trains speak so much louder than when they're speaking to each other: do they not, deep down, believe in the sound carrying over distance unless they shout?

And then there's restaurants. A year or two ago we had an American friend over, who had six hours between planes at Gatwick; we chose a restaurant nearest to Victoria so that he could come up by train and lunch with us. How nice, we thought, to be able to snatch an hour or two's conversation when we hadn't seen him for ages. Wrong: by the beginning of the main course, we were all sitting with our ears cupped in our hands: conversation was just about impossible because of the echoing wooden floors, the minimalist walls and of course the normal clatter of plates and trays. The Good Food Guide never mentioned that. As people get older they don't have to be deaf, which is grim, or even seriously hard of hearing to find noisy places more of a struggle than they used to be.

From the noise point of view, old-fashioned Indian restaurants with flock wallpaper are the best, and one of the reasons some of us still belong to clubs is that their dining rooms usually have soothingly sound-absorbing carpet. It has just occurred to me that when Marlene Dietrich sang, "I like your style. You make me weak. You with your eyes-across-the table technique" she was probably talking to a man who had developed that trick with the eyes simply because he knew she wouldn't actually hear a word he said.

Age, of course, is not the only thing that makes a noise acceptable to one and intolerable to another. People who live in Richmond seem to get along fine with aeroplane noise that would wake the burghers of Carlisle in fury. Townies, completely impervious to the sound of normal traffic, can't get a decent night's rest in the noisy countryside: the weekenders get together to try to silence the church bells, but they can't do much about the dawn chorus or the rumbling lorries or cocks crowing. One uprooted town child apparently sobbed "What's that?" and was soothingly told it was an owl. "I know, but what 'owled it?"

Personally I can't stand loud groups of girls in the Underground talking "unselfconsciously" and laughing like drunken parrots; men in open-topped sports cars in summer, roaring through the silent streets at three in the morning with the radio blazing; and, of course, small mundane things such as the one that gave rise to the limerick: "There was a young man who said, 'If / I threw myself over this cliff / I do not believe /One person would grieve / It comes of my having a sniff."

I know we have nothing like as much to put up with as the really deaf. People are all too apt to get impatient with anyone whose hearing isn't as sharp as their own, in a way they never would with someone whose eyesight wasn't up to much. Maybe it's because if you put your hands over your eyes or find yourself in a lightless room, you can instantly imagine how awful blindness might be; but put your hands over your ears, and it can be quite a relief - not least from all these intrusive sounds I've been grumbling about. And too often, someone who hasn't got good hearing is taken to be just slow on the uptake or a bit dim.

But on one thing we can all agree, one modern invention is of unquestionable benefit to us all: the iPod. Now at last some of the noises off are reduced to the merest whisper, as the music of the young goes in one ear and, mercifully, not out the other. Glory be.