Even, somehow, the snooker balls look tense. My wife and I, at home in the front room, are as tense as you can be on a settee.

Even our goldfish appears tense, stock-still in the bowl with just the occasional twitch of a fin to remind the world that he's not given it all up and gone to goldfish heaven which is a big flat sea with a full-
size castle to play in. That bit about the fish isn't true but I'm just
racking up the tension, as commentators say. By gum it's tense. And silent, really silent.

Then someone coughs. An irritating sound that sounds like "Coughety peff" and the tension and the silence shatter like dropped china cups.

Somebody else replies with a cough that sounds like "Ca-humf" and soon, as the players continue to ply their clicky trade, there's an apparent conversation going on between people from a planet where they only talk in the ancient language of coughs. "Coughety peff?", "Ca-humf!" The silence that had been drawn as tight as a rubber band has gone. The rubber band has twanged.

That made me think about silence, about how much I love it and how rare it is. The silence of tension just before the snooker cue hits the ball (or the cough rings out); the moment of silence at the end of a piece of music just before the applause begins; the moment of precious silence when the baby has just gone to sleep, and the moment of silence in the very early morning at this time of year just before the
first bird makes a noise that sounds like a squeaky door beginning to shut that becomes the overture to the dawn chorus.

Of course, silence is never completely silent. When my wife and I were tense on the settee watching the snooker you could hear, if you listened carefully enough, the boiler firing up to heat the hot water, a low "whoomp" that I'm so used to I hardly notice it. Then a car going by on the top road and, a few streets away like a footprint on the silence or a fossil of a sound, a car alarm beeping.

I like the minute of silence at public occasions, particularly at football matches where, if it works well, the silence can be a mightily powerful force that you can almost touch.

I once heard a record that a man had made of minute silences in different places. At first that sounds like a ridiculous idea, but I found the album quite moving. Each silence was somehow different; one was punctuated by a baby's cry, another by the low drone of an
aircraft somewhere overhead. It was as though the silence was
trying to establish itself in testing and trying conditions, and almost winning.

In a silent world, though, I'd be out of work. As a chap who makes his living talking to people, either live or on the radio, I need to disturb the air to pay the bills. I'm adding to the world's noise (in a joyful way, of course: imagine all that laughter and applause building up!) and what would happen to me, and indeed to us all, when the Day of Reckoning came and we account for all the noise we'd made, all the silences we'd broken? Imagine that meeting at the Pearly Gates, the Pearly Gates that are so well-oiled they made no noise at all when they swing open to greet you.

There's the angel, smiling silently. And there's a huge sack next to him, a sack that groans and rattles and crashes and howls with all the horrible sounds you've ever made. The nice sounds, the loving sounds, the gentle sounds, don't count at this moment. With a grin as wide as
a set of piano keys, the angel tips all the noises out, and you try to
cover your ears but you can't. You've got to listen.

There's that time you shouted insults that you thought were hilarious at that singer doing his very best on stage in Sheffield; there's the terrible earthquaking noise as that pile of tins collapsed in that supermarket in a quiet country town; there's that door slamming; there's that crunching noise as the fork-lift truck you're directing (not driving, thank goodness) makes a lasting impression on that shed; and there's the deafening sound of you, as a teenager, banging metal dustbins with a stick in your mate's back garden in Wombwell at two o'clock in the morning.

Enough. Close the sack up, please. Shhh. Give me some silence. Give me some lovely, lovely silence.