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,

On the Rock n Roll...

I was listening to the news earlier about people who collect benefits being told to volunteer and it reminded me of a few months I spent on the jam roll when I'd just finished college and felt like I needed a break after a busy few weeks shovelling chips and skidding on fat.
I was soon bored and feeling a weight on society (which I was) so I asked at the job centre if there were any courses I could do. They looked at me stupid but I was soon enrolled on a "conservation" course - basically dredging the shite out of ponds. I turned up bright and early on the following Monday and had to sit and wait for a couple of hours until the rest of the doleys had dragged themselves in - they too looked at me stupid as they'd been told to be there or have their benefits stopped and I think I was the only person in the course's history to actually not be forced in.

Then someone took me to one side and said that the conservation work wasn't really conservation work that I had in mind - lots of cheery hard work that was good for the soul - but instead, lots of naughty boys sat in a shed farting and nagging for bacon sandwiches, so would I like to something in the office instead? I was soon designing a ridiculously complicated sensory garden to be planted in their site of north-facing contaminated land outside the portacabin.

I soon realised that not only were courses in portacabins pretty naff, they also didn't leave any time for finding jobs, which was a bit of a problem for me.
Luckily I had a severe bout of chicken pox, followed by the flu, followed by Xmas, by which time I'd managed to wangle myself a proper job and therefore qualified for the course's "Shit, someone actually found work whilst enrolled with us!" award and got a nice few hundred quid to buy myself a crappy Lada.

I presume that my sensory garden plan is still in a cupboard somewhere and I hope that the boys have moved on from farting and bacon sandwiches (although if they have, it won't be due to ambitions founded in the course), but bare this in mind, David Cameron - bacon and ticking target boxes does not a workforce make...

Halloween and School Photographs

It seemed an easy enough thing to remember - school photos on first morning back after half term. However, I hadn't realised that it was also first time back after Hallow'een...
There I was, in the queue, doing what I vowed I would never do - spitting on my children's faces and then rubbing frantically with a sleeve. I got most of the grey off from around eyes from the daughter who'd been a pumpkin, most of the whiskers off the baby's cheeks, but obviously not enough of the eyeliner pencil zig-zagged round the older one's neck.

I was heartened when all the parents were standing around the school gates receiving their children's photo proofs and most of them either had clumps of flour in their hair, or stubborn green sludge at the hair-roots from apple bobbing in slime.

PS - the photos also reminded me of the set in the back of my parents' photo album with us all sat in a row with "PROOF" stamped across our faces: times were obviously hard...