Thursday 10th May

Amidst the noise and bustle of modern life it is harder and harder to grab a quiet moment to one-self.  Everywhere you go you seem to be bombarded by information and the brain simply cannot cope with all this stuff.  From the constantly breaking news (which isn’t breaking at all) of the news channels and the free newspapers which you know you shouldn’t read but are tempted to anyway, and the internet, which  is plagued with adverts, as too is almost all television, even the BBC seem to delight in advertising even more of their programmes you do not want to watch between the ones you actually do want to see.  And even when one switches off everything, unless the windows are hermetically sealed you can still hear the quiet swish of wet tyres tirelessly roaming the streets like ravenous beasts seeking out innocent prey.

So, a quiet moment to oneself is becoming a rarer and rarer commodity, but one it would seem to be valued less and less in today’s busy world.   If one answers the perennial question “And what have you been up to lately?” with the honest answer, ‘Oh, actually nothing at all, I have been trying to do precisely nothing, and to positively stop doing anything, if only for a moment or two every day,’ then you will get some very strange looks indeed.  But I would like to run a small flag (maybe a pennant) up the flagpole for quietude.  There it is, amongst all the loud and crazy bunting flapping around, a small plea for sanity in this mad mad world.