It’s all so quiet. Just the way I like it: my husband is out; it’s pouring, so no one is mowing (the only thing that ever breaches the peace around here) and even the birds are taking a rain check. I can hear my own breathing; hear myself think. But what I’m thinking is: is it too quiet?
I craved quiet for so long. For 30 years, actually, since my first year at university. I was living with three others who did an entirely normal amount of partying, dancing and shagging. But I was quietly falling apart and hearing all that ordinary, raucous life made me feel desperately sad and out of control. Since then, I’ve passed through shared accommodation where I was the weird 21-year-old knocking on doors in my pyjamas to ask neighbours to turn their music down; city blocks where you knew exactly what everyone was watching on TV; a street frequented by 5am glass-recycling lorries; and, for a particularly challenging time, a house next to a family of brass instrumentalists.
It all spawned an obsession with avoiding noise that eventually brought us to this quiet cocoon in this peaceful suburb. It’s a privilege I’m intensely grateful for, and privilege is the word: the pernicious effects of noise pollution – estimated to cause 12,000 premature deaths a year in the EU alone – disproportionately affects low-income areas; you really can buy silence.
But recently, the volume on my life has been turned down still further. For a start, my sons moved out, radically paring back the domestic soundscape. No more background burble of Netflix and podcasts, slammed doors or clattering, sizzling cooking experiments; our chats are scheduled now. I quit my (remote) day job, removing a baseline of regular conversation with other humans from my week. In the autumn we lost the dog and with him, a deeply familiar, deeply missed playlist: nails clicking on tiles, the urgent yelp to go outside, a sigh as if deflating as he settled on his bed, and soft, slack-lipped snores as he slept in my office.
Then – and this made me sadder than it should in this world – when I was away in February, foxes took five of my six hens. I loved those little girls with all my heart, and I loved the aural landscape they created in the garden: conversational clucks; excitable snack rivalry; contented purrs (truly!); the triumphant announcement of an egg. You can’t keep a hen solo, so a kind friend welcomed the survivor into her own flock. I’ll get more, eventually, but my heart is too bruised, and the foxes too hungry.
So here I am, leading my quietest possible life. I’m not sure what I thought would happen when I attained peak peace – I’d start running or write the Great Yorkshire Novel (equally quixotic ambitions)? But I haven’t become Proust in his cork-lined room; I’m aimless, a bit odd and, guess what: perversely drawn to noise. I’m addicted to the Merlin birdsong app, parsing every chirrup and trill of avian drama in our postcode, often catching myself explaining something a goldfinch did to my patient husband like a Minecraft-obsessed child (I should probably stop doing that; if I bore him away, I’ll be in real trouble). I talk to plants and domestic appliances, waylay the postman and clumsily compliment strangers in the street on their gardens, dogs or coats. Like Marnie, the solitary heroine of David Nicholls’ new novel You Are Here (I have ample quiet reading time now), I make little sounds that aren’t quite language as I potter round. I’ve even started to enjoy, not resent, involuntarily eavesdropping on the virtual meeting noise emanating from my husband’s office, even popping in to offer unsolicited, ill-informed opinions on procurement matters. I’ll be inviting Tory canvassers in to chat next.
I craved (most of) this quietness and I got it; lucky me. I could never go back to knowing the council noise abatement team number by heart. But the past few months have reminded me not to insulate myself entirely; not to switch on max noise cancelling on life. Because – whisper it – I think there might actually be such a thing as too quiet.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
