Listening

And of course, it’s easier to listen, once the noise stops. Once the fridge stops humming and the washing machine stops whirring. When that song on the radio grows so maddening that you switch it off. Once the loudest voice in the group goes home, once the crying child has been taken to another room. When the leaf blower, the hedge trimmer, the idle motorbike - once they have all gone away.

That’s when slowly, it creeps back in. And you realise it’s not that bad, actually, it’s completely manageable when there’s no sound louder than the inside of your own head. Trees rustling, a football being kicked down the road. A distant car. Maybe a bird.

There, now. Not so bad to be alone. Without the other person talking and laughing and crashing around and running the tap and hopping in the shower and coming and going. And asking you questions, and not listening to the answers. 

You both stopped listening to the answers. 

Stopped listening to the breaths in-between words, the gestures in place of a retort. 

No, not so bad. The aching, yawning silence is not so loud. It slaps the sides of your head and screams in your ears, but it’s fine, you can cope with it. 

Can’t you? 

So you put the radio back on. You will the hedge trimmer back into existence. You put another wash load on, you run the tap and hop in the shower. You come and go, you rustle the trees and kick a football down the road. You meet up with loud friends and choose tables next to crying children, and order takeaway just to hear the idle motorbike. 

And you listen to the birds. And you wait for their voice to come home. 

The Beginning of a Relationship

I keep dreaming of drowning. 

Every time, it starts peacefully - the sun shining, the blue sky, the still water. 

I am watching a man in red swimming trunks on a small rock in the middle of the sea. He dives elegantly into the water, he swims a little, and then the sky turns dark and a wave appears from nowhere and engulfs him. 

I see a man get stabbed in the stomach, who jumps into the water thinking it would be better to drown instead, instead of dying by someone else’s hand. And then I am him, swimming, and I feel the pain in my lungs and push further and further into not being able to breathe. I surrender to it. 

But then I realise the salt water might heal my stab wound, I just need to breathe, and keep swimming. 

Snow, February 2019

It’s snowing. It has snowed. But it’s London, so all that’s really happened is train delays, and I have cold feet.

I see a man with a cello and a stool trying to balance his things and himself enough to make it more than a few steps at a time, to make it to the concert hall up the road. But why the stool? Very particular about his stool, can only get the right notes and resonance on that stool. 

Passed down through his family, he learnt to play sitting on that stool as a child. As his cello grew in size, his feet grew closer to the ground. Don’t move until you’ve finished your practice! But I need the toilet. Not until you’ve finished! He now associates Bach with a full bladder, and panics whenever he has to play it on stage, even if he went to the toilet directly before the show. 

Trudging through this snow, his father would be…what? Proud? We like to imagine so. But largely, he would critique the way he’s trying to carry it, or ridicule him for not being successful enough to afford a taxi - or a car - to take him there.

Perhaps he loves the snow.

Perhaps he likes the quiet of it. 

The musician is at the venue now. He’s quietly finding where he needs to be, and telling them what he needs to do. He carries his stool the whole time. They offer him one of their standard ones to use instead, and he politely declines. 

There’s nothing particularly unique or special about his stool: it’s a light brown wood, varnished, tall, a foot rung part way down. The staff actually think it’s unsightly, and wonder who’s going to have to have the conversation with him, but they decide to leave it until later, and to a more senior member of staff.

No one has offered him a cup of tea yet. No one has asked him how his journey was, or even commented on the snow. 

It’s the one thing he misses about ever having had regular work. Normal work - the sort where you come in on Monday and leave on Friday, and weekends exist. And you inevitably think about your job in all the hours you’re not there. People ask you how you are and what you’ve been up to and what you have planned, in the hope you can make them feel like you’re all still interesting. But what they’re really asking for is for you to take them all away for a moment. 

 But slowly, they do start to care about you, and dammit you start to care about them. 

He misses that.

But the draw of dragging his cello through the snow was just too strong. 

In the Palm of Your Ears

Whether you’ve been privy to it or not, there has been a boom in the consumption of audiobooks in the past few years. I produce them for publishers including Audible, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Orion, and I see a lot of the good (and bad) literature that gets made into something you can download and listen to. This increase in consumption is something of a marvel, even to those of us present in the studio at the time of recording. We’re not complaining, or even doubting its legitimacy, but there’s a lot of asking, “Why?”

Instead of standing at the coffee machine and mulling it over with actors, publishers and studio managers as I often do, I wanted to give it some proper thought.

My first impulse was that this boost in interest is in tandem with our love affair with having everything immediately available on a smartphone. YouTube, TV, music, films, social media, the news, e-books, podcasts…audiobooks? It is deeply entrenched in humans to crave stories, and to love storytelling, and this technology has simply made satisfying that craving more readily available.

Okay, but isn’t the paperback book just as good at serving that purpose? You might argue, hasn’t it been so for decades? 

I love the paperback book and it is my preferred way of consuming literature. But the practicality of it is limited. Doubtless there’s an excellent study somewhere about how people’s commuting behaviours have changed in recent years, but here are some brief notes from my own observations: due to economic challenges, we typically live further from work, and spend more time in cars and on trains. Whether you’re walking to work, or moving between buses and changing trains, continuous reading is impossible. So what if the book can walk and change trains with you? What if you can stick something in your ears to seamlessly take you out of the sardine crush, away from someone’s Weetabix breath, and even further from the drunk man trying to start a conversation? This is where the audiobook has the edge. 

But I think it goes deeper than that, still. 

Podcasts have served to make listening to audio content trendy. My generation talk about podcasts with the same fervour with which we’d talk about a TV show. With friends, we recommend podcasts to each other, and it’s nice to catch up on where we’ve got to. There’s a lovely sense of community to the voices you’ve listened to, then talked with each other about. Whereas reading can be such a personal experience - your own voice in your head, and your own particular journey into your mind’s eye - a narrator lifts the story to a shared experience, thereby replicating this sense of community. Likewise, when I read essays, memoirs and autobiographies now, I want to be listening to an audio version, and hear it from them, and feel like I’m part of a wider conversation.

(Producer hat on: I only approve of author-reads if the author can read their own work in an engaging way, and the recording is clean.)

We crave content, crave entertainment, crave distraction from the drudgery of routine, even more so now that we’re increasingly used to having information at our fingertips. Audio content feels like a low-key, low-risk solution to that. There’s something about it that feels like down-time, feels like mindfulness, and I love the multi-tasking pretence of lying under a blanket with my eyes closed, still able to consume something I want to be reading. 

However, I think the practical benefits of audiobooks are by the by.  Music, the radio and indeed podcasts can easily and equally take us from home to work and to a cosy space under a blanket. No problem. So I wonder if the main point that is driving this boom really is that deep, very human yearning for good storytelling, and that desire for a sense of community. Technological advances have made that instantly accessible. 

The world today is a dark and scary place; how very special, how very soothing, to unplug and plug in and have the human voice tell you a story. To have it all in the palm of your ears, so to speak, while to world outside rages.