Silence

       Well, Dear Reader, I have been appreciating again this week that which I have always appreciated but, maybe, not articulated generously enough over the years. Yes, silence is a very important part of my life. OK, I can hear the comments now. “That’s because you are old”. “That’s because you are grumpy and old”. That may be true except that when I was a young man silence was important to me back then..

I have ranted before about leaf blowers. I continue to be irritated by cars and motorbikes that are unnecessarily noisy. Of recent years as I walk the Spirit Trail and share it with bikes and other motorised transport, the arrival of these pieces of equipment accompanied by loud music invading my space I find to be obnoxious. Maybe that is because speeding push bikes on a path are already an irritant. It is supposedly a free country and there is no law against listening to loud music. So I suck it up and lump it and become more determined to focus on my silent reverie.

It has been suggested to me, Dear Friends,  that I should make my long walks more interesting by listening to podcasts. I am unlikely ever to do that. Why? Because even though I walk, by and large, in an urban environment I want to hear what is going on in the ‘real world’. Early morning I can hear the birds; when the wind blows the trees carry their own message. For sure this means that I have to also notice the sounds of work in the local shipyard, the movement of the trains along the railway track but if these are really, really a burden I can find a local park away from them.

Somewhere in my youth I heard the mantra, “Children should be seen and not heard”. Presumably that meant that we needed to be seen so that the adults knew that we weren’t setting fire to the cat; we needed not to be heard because adult conversations were wise and thoughtful and we were children and therefore only spoke childish nonsense.  We know this not to be true. I like cats. The legend of the leader of the British Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskill, back in the day was that when he was an infant in his pram, a young woman stopped his mother intent on making endearing comments about her child. On pushing back the hood and preparing to tickle young Hugh under the chin, he is reputed to have said, “Madam, the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Likely an urban legend, I know, but designed to tell us of the brilliance of the man to come. Point is that we should learn to listen to children more while also giving them the skills to listen to others. Talk is silver but silence is golden.

I have also read that the greatest lies are often told in silence. And, of course, we have all heard non-answers, fudged answers and subject changing answers, particularly from those people who would rule us. I would rather hear the untruth as silence.

Queen Elizabeth II died last week. While the idea of primogeniture is a patently ridiculous concept (The idea that I should have inherited my father’s medical doctor status has meant that there are people alive today who otherwise wouldn’t be! It also would have meant that our son would not have been the excellent carpenter that he is or our daughter the copyright manager at the British Library) sometimes there is the exception that proves the rule. The Queen was around for all of my 70 years on the planet. One sort of got used to having her about; an immovable rock in an eroding world. We all want the best surgeon to take out our appendix, the best financial planner to manage our money and we want our car serviced by somebody who won’t allow the brakes to fail. Meritocracy is undeniably best for us all. But sometimes one has to let the heart rule the head and allow our humanity to replace Science and logic. As Charles Dickens said in ‘Hard Times’,

“There is a wisdom of the head, there is a wisdom of the heart.”

And besides, Dear Reader, aside from the monarchy, there are still people in our meritocratic society who have somehow achieved positions of power and greatness through a very puzzling system of no rhyme and less reason. So am I a monarchist—No? Did I admire the late queen—-Yes? So what has this got to do with silence?

I watched on the BBC the 30 minute special of the 6 hour drive from Balmoral to Holyrood in Edinburgh,   the dead queen’s Scottish journey. I really had no intention of so doing but, I guess, that this was a journey through places that I have visited frequently. My interest was piqued. What sold me on watching the procession to its conclusion was the commentator and her commentary. Magnificent! Why? Because she had the right balance. She understood when to speak and when not. There were long moments on the Royal Mile when the silent cars slipped silently passed silent crowds through the silent gates of Holyrood.  It was a sombre procession; the crowd, by and large, was quiet and respectful; occasionally something flashed across the screen, flowers thrown from the throng. And above all the commentator gave us her silence and allowed us to think what we thought; permitted us to feel what we felt; let us look where we wanted to look. It takes real art and confidence to step back silently from a situation and allow a drama to unfold without a background commentary; she allowed millions of unique perceptions to be uninfluenced and untainted by superfluous inanities and excessive breathless excitement. Sometimes, Friends, silence is very, very loud.