Silence is Golden

It's good to get away from the office and the keyboard sometimes, to sit peacefully with just a notepad and a pen. Somehow in a different environment the ideas flow in a different way. It seems more organic, like I'm creating stories in the same way that people have done for centuries.

I sat in my local library, a lovely new building that laughs in the face of all the local council cuts that have fallen on similar facilities up and down the country recently. It's more of a community centre really but the library section is excellent, well stocked with books and incredibly peaceful. It's almost like a church for those of us who worship the written word. I settled into a comfortable wing-backed armchair, paused a moment to soak in the calming atmosphere and then took up the tools of my trade.

In this perfect workplace I churned out page after page of useful prose and nodes, the ideas flowing directly from brain to arm to pen to page. It was effortless, almost like automatic writing, if you believe in such things. I was, as athletes say, in the zone and all was well in my ultra-productive world.

Remember that I said the library is a kind of community centre? I should have become suspicious when the librarians began to erect a set of brightly coloured barriers around the children's book area, just beside my little oasis of calm. I should have noticed that the little cluster of push chairs and buggies in the doorway had multiplied in the last few moments but I was so engrossed in my work that my peripheral vision had sort of shut down. I was pretty much oblivious to everything except my blurring hand and the scribbled squiggles that it left on the page.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that 'Hell is other people'. If I may, for the purposes of this blog I'll amend that to 'Hell is other people's children.' Now, I'm sire that all the little darlings are perfect angels, at least as far as their parents are concerned, but an entire pack of them did nothing for the library's ambience or my concentration. Fingernails down a blackboard sound like nothing compared to a shrieking two year old. The repeated and unheeded maternal calls for Tilly and Kayden to stop running around weren't really conducive to my channelling of the muse but I grit my teeth and pushed my pen with a renewed purpose. I'm a professional. I could work through this. And I did. I plodded on and tried to block out the sounds of carnage. I have to be a bit smug here and say that it worked. For a bit. Right up until the singing started.

I'm quite willing to believe that, at some point in his fictional furry life, Little Peter Rabbit did indeed have a fly upon his noes but let's be honest: his tale doesn't really make for great song lyrics. He's never going to win an Ivor Novello with lines about his floppy ears and curly whiskers. But the thirty or so members of the mother and toddler group didn't seem to care, with the elder half of their contingent singing along with gusto in four different keys at the same time, while the younger attendees either stared at their parents in bemused incomprehension or completely ignored them and continued slapping their play partners with the hardest hardback they could wield.

I momentarily considered joining with the song but suspected that my vibrant tenor might stand out among so many wobbly altos and sopranos. And anyway, I know a somewhat different set of lyrics to the tune that they were attempting. I'm all for education at an early age but I think that there are some things that these toddlers were a little too young to find out about.

I tried to carry on with my work but the moment had passed. My creative juices had dried up like a week-old Lidl Satsuma. It was no good. I packed up my stuff in my manly man-bag and headed for the coffee shop around the corner. Perhaps a slice of Victoria sponge would clear my ears.

But just before I left the library lady nearby asked if she could have a piece of paper to scribble some notes on and naturally I shared a page from my notebook with her. There was never any question as to whether I would. Share with people, it's just the right thing to do.  Remember: there's no I in Pad.