The moments that are least likely to return are the ones you remember. For me, Sunday 12th April 2020, Easter Sunday for the record, is one of those. A day the earth stood still. The hum of civilisation finally came to a standstill. The sound of silence. I have been waiting my whole life for this moment. You see, I have a dirty little secret; a penchant for the apocalyptic film genre. A world with no work, just the feeling of endless days. I imagine the first Sunday evening when you retire must feel like this - a countless block of time, just for you. Other than food, zombies and marauding psycho biker gangs all of your worries are gone.
I collect my tools and set off down the path to do some work in the woods. My wife asks me if I'll be using the chainsaw today. No, that would be an abuse. We probably won't get another day like this, not in my lifetime. It is so quiet; I can hear the wings of a blue tit flapping behind me and the whole industry of the busy pollinators.
Noise is such a pervasive pollutant. We have so little control over the cacophony of modern life. It is not possible to consciously not hear something. We cannot close our ears. Worse still, we cannot choose whether or not to interpret the actual message being decoded by our brains. You are forced to understand what is being said. Try it! next time you are listening to the radio, try not to understand what is being said - Impossible! Everyone is forcing their messaging on us and we just have to take it.
I'm splitting the logs that I had felled a few months earlier in the cutting season, when the world seemed a very different place. I hear the delicate and intricate song of the Blackcap in the trees and the pewing of buzzards in the sky. It's not silence I crave, but the sound of nature. According to Charles Darwin, one mustn't be overly seduced by birdsong; after all, a war is raging between the sexes and the species - if you could decode it, it would be distressing. I pick up my axe and console myself with the fact that one man's noise is another's symphony.
