Immediately I was in a tropical jungle

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 216.

How the world has changed. Now there were more people on the streets of Cambridge than lived in Cambridge. Some streets were packed primarily with locals, some primarily with tourists. Every few steps some cheerful young person would thrust a leaflet at me for some kind of a tour – coach tour, walking tour, ghost tour, hop on/hop off bus tour. Every shop doorway and postcard rack, indeed every available space within sight of a historic building, was crowded with gaggles of foreign youngsters, usually with matching backpacks. I wanted a coffee, but the cafés were filled to overflowing, so I went to John Lewis on the presumption that I would find a quiet café there, up on the top floor, with views over rooftops. John Lewis always has a café with a view over rooftops, and it did have here, too, but it was packed, with a queue stretching back to the Keep Calm and Carry On giftware section. At least two dozen people hadn’t even reached the wet plastic trays yet. (Why are trays at John Lewis always wet? How do they think that helps?) The idea of creeping along behind people who couldn’t decide between a pain aux raisins and a fruit cup, or who wondered if they could just have a daub of Dijon on the side and were happy to stop the line while some hapless skivvy went down to the cellars to fetch a new jar, or who got to the till and didn’t have the right money and had to send a search party to fetch Clive – well, I couldn’t face that. So I gave up on coffee and went and looked at televisions because that’s what men do in John Lewis. There were over three hundred of us, moving solemnly up and down the rows of televisions, considering each in turn, even though the televisions were all essentially identical and none of us needed a television anyway. Then I examined laptops – tapped the keys, opened and closed the lids, nodding ruminatively, like a judge at a vegetable-growing competition – and finally waited my turn to listen to the demonstrator Bose headphones. I dropped the headphones on to my ears and immediately I was in a tropical jungle – and I mean right in it, aurally immersed – listening to cawing birds and skitterings in the undergrowth. Then I was in Manhattan at rush hour with murmured voices and honking horns. Then in a cleansing spring shower with just an occasional crack of thunder. The fidelity was uncanny. Then I opened my eyes and I was back in John Lewis in Cambridge on a Sunday. It was perhaps little wonder that six men were waiting behind me for a go on the headphones.