Books

Monday 22 November 2010

Silence...

Silence is apparently the new thing that people are just discovering.

John Cage has a single which consists of 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence and there is a big buzz / hush about it. There is also apparently a programme on BBC 2 about people who go to a silent retreat and spend - goodness me - 23 hours a day in silence (with one hour in which they can chat to a spiritualist helper).
Let's spare a little moment here for the poor sods who live alone and have just one visitor a week in the form of a home help, or those who have no friends and instead play X-boxes for 23 hours a day - if they turned the sound off, they'd be in the equivalent of the retreat, but without the carrot juice and the hard beds.
I once had an eleven day period in which I spoke to no-one save for three sentences, four times - "one cup of coffee, please" (although as it was in my poor Spanish, it could well have been "One cup of coffee sausage"). The eleven days of silence were no big deal - they were certainly not worth starting a Facebook page about.
Which brings me to the Facebook page that apparently signs people up to buying said silent record and making it the Xmas number 1. The obvious reply is to buy something you actually like and then turn the radio off for 4 minutes 37 seconds and then you get double the pleasure for your money - plus an additional three seconds of silence (did you spot that one?)
It is times like this when I wonder whether everyone else is just a little unbalanced, or whether I just live in a very quiet place and I am sure that with living in a house with three wild children and someone who talks shit for a living, that cannot be the case.

Come on folks - sort it out...

Come on folks,