I was on the phone to a friend the other evening, when they asked me from what beach I was calling.
This caught me off guard because I was speaking to them from the car park of the Irish News, which is typically compared to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Versailles rather than the Côte d'Azur and Portstewart Strand.
I guess it's just about possible, at a push, that if you squinted in a certain light - during the middle of the night around the winter solstice, for example - and used a little imagination, then Donegall Street could be regarded as performing, at best, a rather poor impersonation of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice or Bangor's Pickie Pool.
But that isn't what prompted my friend's question.
It came about because they were unable to ignore the incessant squawking of seagulls - or herring gulls, as a colleague advises - which have formed the soundtrack to life in the white heat of the Irish News newsroom for what by now feels like a little longer than eternity.
Earlier this year, loudspeakers were erected around the car park and the roofs of the sprawling Irish News campus.
Since then, we have been serenaded with screeches of sufficient intensity, frequency and volume that even experienced trawlermen would be diving for cover.
The sub-woofers were intended to deter the gulls and pigeons which have in previous years made a sojourn in the Irish News car park an essential part of their traditional route to roost.
It's important to point out that the environs of the newsroom are not lacking for noise during the day.
And as well as the internal racket, there is also the banging and bashing from the massive Ulster University building site behind us.
Weirdly, the construction site also evokes the spirit of the football World Cup held in South Africa in 2010 thanks to the unleashing of a vuvuzela chorus several times a day.
Under normal circumstances a vuvuzela in central Belfast would be noteworthy enough on its own; but the bird machine means we can no longer be said to live in normal times.
Anyway, the Acme bird machine has not been an entirely unalloyed success. During the day, gulls and pigeons stalk the car park and the roofs in relatively small numbers.
But from around 6pm - presumably once the birds have realised that the vuvuzelas have been packed up for the day - it all goes boogaloo.
That's when they turn up for the avian equivalent of la passeggiata, that Italian practice of sauntering around town on an evening stroll, and ratchet up the racket, oblivious to the entreaties of the electronics. Cock of the walk wouldn't be in it.
Come 8pm, the combined effect of the real birds and the relentless digital din has built to a crescendo of syncopated call-and-respond that even the FBI would regard as too severe to sample for its next Guantanamo Bay music torture mix-tape.
After 13 hours of the cacophony yesterday, I began to wonder if the music they play on Talkback would be an easier listen...
That's all a very long way of explaining why my friend thought I was phoning him from a beach.
Sound has a unique capacity to affect us. It's why hour after hour after hour of bird calls will drive you mad. It's why a dripping tap will keep you awake at night. It's why songs from Barney & Friends are used during interrogation at US 'dark sites', and why the FBI blasted Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walkin' at David Koresh during the Waco siege.
Sound achieves its highest form as music; in The Republic, Plato even reckoned that "musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul".
Music - sound - gets places in our soul, in our psyche, that nothing else can. Even the tone deaf know this.
But we also know that an empty vessel makes the most sound. Listen to Boris Johnson's progress towards Downing Street for proof. The Irish News bird machine would run him very close, though.
