It’s A Funny Old World: Gabrielle Mullarkey

‘Amy got off the bus a few stops later, Sandra shouting at me to “Get a life!”’

Irecently saw the film A Quiet Place, much of which is conducted in tense silence, the premise being that humans are hunted by blind carnivores who can hear a cup of tea being stirred in the next village. As a result, the family in the film communicate by sign language, a skill they’ve readily adopted, as one of the children is hearing-impaired.

The main reason for the film’s popularity, other than the fact it’s properly scary? It’s set in a world where you’ve got an excellent reason to tell your kids/neighbours to keep the volume down, in this case indefinitely.

Silence is not only golden, it’s also relative. Look no further than a 1960s work called 4Õ33Ó by composer John Cage. This is a piece of ‘music’ lasting four minutes and 33 seconds, in which a pianist sits at the piano, opening and shutting the lid between movements. The absence of music isn’t the absence of sound – at each performance, there’s plenty of coughing and whispering in the auditorium, no doubt of the ‘what the heck is going on here?’ variety.

Cage had no idea what lay round the corner. Anyone who’s tried to read a book or have a snooze in a train’s ‘quiet carriage’ will have been confounded by the nonstop pinging of emails, playing of music tracks and shouting into mobiles. To these can be added a new phenomenon I’ve noticed when out and about – people putting their mobiles on speakerphone when holding a conversation. Now you can not only hear someone reveal that they’re going into a tunnel, but also enjoy the listener’s response to this time-honoured nugget.

I had the following exchange on a bus not long ago:

Me (to passenger in the seat behind me): ‘Excuse me, I don’t know if you’re aware, but your phone is on speakerphone.’

Woman on speakerphone: ‘Who’s that talking to you, Amy?’

Amy (woman on bus): ‘Some random who doesn’t like me being on speakerphone, Sandra.’

Sandra: ‘What a cheek! Let me FaceTime her.’

Amy (turning her phone to face me): ‘Sandra wants to FaceTime you.’

And so I found myself interacting with a stranger who asked me (in more colourful language than recalled here), ‘What’s your blinkin’ problem, then?’

Although I knew this question was a rhetorical one, I decided to answer it.

Amy got off the bus a few stops later, Sandra shouting at me to ‘Get a life!’

I like to think that, one day, Amy and Sandra will come to realise they’re invading the personal space and ears of their fellow occupants of public spaces, but I’m not holding my breath.

Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope. Just as theatres take a dim view of gadget gaffes from the audience, some restaurants are introducing ‘tech-free nights’ where diners leave their phones at the door and reconnect with each other through a BYOB (bring your own banter) initiative.

Like I said, ‘silence’ isn’t necessarily the absence of sound, but of some sounds we’ve grown so used to (and so accustomed to tolerating) that their withdrawal comes as a welcome reprieve, whether it’s a pneumatic drill in the road or Sandra telling Amy she can’t decide between a crinkle- or a straight-cut chip for dinner.

Tiptoeing about in case you’re snaffled by a flesh-eating alien is a bit drastic, I grant you. But let’s wake up, smell the coffee and hear the birdsong. We can all spare four minutes and 33 seconds for that.