Yearning for the sound of silence

FANCY a bit of peace and quiet? Then maybe you should head for New York. It's "the city that never sleeps" and they've had enough. Clearly desperate for a decent night's kip, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg is waging war on noise.

Barking dogs, car alarms, pneumatic drills, nightclubs, Mr Softee ice cream vans - they're all going to have to pipe down. And as this is the man who banned smoking in bars, there might be some chance of success.

Noise is a pollutant, an irritant. More than that - it can reduce people to gibbering insanity. There have been a number of cases of people being driven so mad by noise that they've gone round and killed the noisy neighbours. Extreme, yes, but gosh can't we sympathise?

The problem is that our worlds are so noisy now we don't know what silence is. On a Scottish island with only a couple of tractors in the whole place, you can almost feel the sound of silence The rest of the time, in most of the rest of the UK, there is the constant background hum of traffic, so constant that we don't hear it any more - until it stops.

The same with electricity in our houses. We hardly notice it until we have a power cut and we feel uncomfortable, sensing that something is different.

Young people are growing deaf because they spend so much time banging their heads to loud music, so because they can't hear too well, they turn the volume up a bit more. And so it goes on. Low flying jets... partying neighbours... early morning lawn mowers... mobile phone conversations... burglar alarms.. all add to the noise and stress levels of life.

If we could time travel back a century or so, what would surely hit us most would be the silence. Wouldn't it be blissful?

In the meantime, we could all keep the noise down a bit. Even when we're speaking.

In the pub the other day, two women at the next table insisted in talking in very loud voices first about some family feud that was more complicated but a lot less interesting than your average soap opera. And then about their particularly gory menopausal symptoms.

At other times, in other places, at a lower volume I might have sympathised. But not, frankly, when I was about to tackle a nice bit of sea bass.

So the mayor of New York has my sympathy, support and encouragement.

The problem is, of course, that if we reduce all the background noise, we'd be able to hear all those graphic conversations even more clearly.

Maybe I'd prefer the barking dogs and burglar alarms.

Hope for hapless cooks

HOORAY for a school in Derbyshire! They have apparently banned parents from making cakes for the school fair - in case they poison people.

Isn't that wonderful?

The fact that, as far as I know, in the entire history of school cake stalls there has never yet been a case of food poisoning is neither here nor there. It's just that the ban saves so much human misery.

I am hopeless at making cakes. They taste quite good but they look, well... let us say that my cakes do not have eye appeal. Something about the sunken centre and the wonky icing.

So I used to dread the call for the cake stall. And if I did make anything, I would make sure I was first there and hastily buy it back before anyone realised what a dismal disaster it was.

There was a small group of mothers who would happily make cakes, would nonchalantly, even absent-mindedly, knock out an extra two, three or four, while I sweated blood over my humble offering, knowing I was letting my children down.

"Are you really going to ask people to pay money for that?" asked one of my sons once, before walking out of the kitchen, devastated by the shame of having such a hopeless mother.

And I wasn't alone. We've all seen the shop-bought cakes, the packet of chocolate biscuits, the bought cake with the home-made icing sneaking their way onto the stall.

For some mothers, making cake is a pleasure and delight. For many others it's purgatory. So I salute that school and their silly rule. They might have made themselves look daft, but I bet they've made a lot of hopeless mothers very happy.

A taste of her

own medicine

A JUDGE in Texas had an added twist for a woman found guilty of letting her horses starve. For the first few days of her jail sentence, she will receive only bread and water.

The Mikado - whose object all sublime was to make the punishment fit the crime - would doubtless approve.

It opens up all sorts of ideas for imaginative sentencing. But maybe we'd better stop before we get to sex offenders.

Why it's one or the

other for women

WOMEN interviewed by Top Sante magazine, said they were tired of trying to juggle home and work and the quest for the perfect figure.

Which just proves my theory. Yes of course women can have it all - but not all at the same time.