Blessed sound of silence

I’m going to miss the silence, which is odd because my hearing is lousy, and by rights I ought to be grateful for any kind of din. But I don’t bless the noise of traffic, loud motorbikes, yelling drunks, the high-pitched squeals of young women rushing to the point of no return, or other people’s music at full throttle for a rowdy party. Visually, I haven’t missed the takeaway food wrappers and broken bottles lying in gutters either.

Silence is privacy. It’s the invasion of other people’s lives that I resent, because I like to keep my own to myself. That makes me a misanthrope on bad days.

Yet I choose to live in a city.

Quiet is a luxury, the reason why rich people have deep, plush carpets and cars with engines that gently murmur. It’s why they live at the end of long driveways, or high up in tower blocks with double glazing. It’s about getting away from other people and the racket they make.

I have loved the weeks of few cars on the streets, meaning I could hear birdsong. Where I live there are often helicopters overhead, aiming for the hospital. I sometimes think of the hapless Vietnamese who had to endure that sound in a war we should never have been involved in, so I look on that as penance.

The other sound I’ve been hearing is tu¯ ı¯. Sometimes they fly so close you think you could touch them, the whirr of their feathers like a helicopter in miniature. I can remember when you never saw a tu¯ ı¯ in the city from one year to the next, but here they call to each other off and on all day, that double voicebox of theirs making them sound at times as if they’re having a one-bird conversation with themselves, one-half tuneful, the other staccato, mocking and mechanical.

Two favourite sounds in the silence have been the wind in the trees, especially as the leaves dry and start to fall, and birds settling at night in our large tree. I like to slip outside just before nightfall, when they report on the day’s activities.

For the sake of their companionable chattering I tolerate the mess they make of the garden beneath them.

Real estate agents are finding, I’ve read, that since the lockdown buyers have been looking for places with gardens. They have no doubt discovered it’s hard to live with other people in small apartments with no outside to muck about in, and realise they could grow flowers, even food, if they had a patch of dirt. I’m pleased about that. Growing things is a quiet and sensible pleasure. It’d be a shame to lose it.

The idea of hearing the world at its true volume puts me off hearing aids. My guess is most people wear them for a short time, then give up. If you want to communicate with me, draw speech balloons. I can read.

One friend has kept sane during lockdown by refusing to read about the American person whose name starts with T. I wish I’d had that degree of self-control. I’ve been reading the T-person’s ravings assiduously, which only raises my blood pressure, and that does no good at all.

In that connection I could cite many T-words, say: troublesome, treacherous, tyrannical, tempestuous, tortuous, tacky, tedious, triumphalist and tricky, while others would be more to the point, such as temerarity and taradiddler. For the rest I will be tactfully tacent.

The print edition of the Complete Oxford Dictionary is a miracle of quiet amusement. I recommend it for the next lockdown. (Temerarity: reprehensible negligence, heedlessness; taradiddler, fibber; tacent, silent.)