Lulu has different imperatives to you or I. She needs to preserve her voice for singing, and as she embarks on her farewell tour at the age of 75 she’s shared her methods: she doesn’t talk at all until noon. She stays in her room, she says, which makes it easier. I like to think of her doing all that in a silk eye mask.
I also wonder whether there’s a wider life lesson here. I’ve nothing to conserve, vocally, but it’s possible my compadres could use a little peace and quiet. The longest I’ve ever stayed silent before was when I had a colleague who was a gambler. He liked to be accompanied to William Hill but said it curdled his luck if we talked. So regularly a bunch of us would have to spend maybe three and a half minutes in total silence. I always came out of there feeling physically sick. But that was the 90s, and I’m wiser and more peaceful now.
8am
My spouse is working full-time to break my resolve with provocative statements, but this only makes me more dug-in, and – sidebar – marriage is great, kids, you should try it. “Look at the vape capitals of the UK,” he says, “they map directly on to leave-voting areas.” “No, no, no,” I text, “weak causality.” But he’s not even looking at his phone, he’s on to Holly Willoughby and whether being a small-nation’s sweetheart will translate into global screen success, per her Netflix deal. I text “no”, and then some more “no”s related to who knows what.
Then: “What a statesman Wes Streeting is. What a time to be alive, when that moral giant walks the earth,” he says, and now a screed of “NO” covers the screen he’s not looking at, and then he completely wrong-foots me with a cup of coffee. At 8.29am, not even an eighth of the way through my quest, I accidentally say “thank you”.
9am
It’s still the Easter holidays, during which my 16-year-old son allocates me 42 minutes a day of his high-quality attention, but it has to be at a time when nobody more important is awake, so we’re watching The West Wing, in silence, at 9.07am. “It’s weird without the commentary,” he says during the credits, and I text: “How many comments would I typically have made over the music?”, and he says “nine”.
10am
Silent me is fine by my son when we’re in the same room but it spooks the hell out of him when I go downstairs. “You could be in any room and I wouldn’t know because you’re not talking,” he says, kind of mystified by the immensity of the peril. “Anywhere I go, there’s a chance you’ll be there.”
11am
My 14-year-old daughter doesn’t let me write about her, so let’s just say I have a very rude neighbour and I go to wake her up. “Oh my God, you can’t talk!” she says, delighted. “Shut up,” I text. “You shut up! No, wait, you already have. This is the best day of my life.”
I text her to stop gloating and help me. “Help you how?” she asks. “Tell the dog he’s a good boy,” I message. “But he hasn’t done anything good?” “It’s not event-specific, it’s a state of being.” “I’m sorry,” she says, “you’re going to have to wait till 12 and tell him yourself.”
I’m so desperate to start talking that by 11.38 I’m flashing down each remaining minute with my fingers while she wonders aloud whether I’ve considered staying silent for the entire day.
Noon
Lulu was right, it’s much easier not to talk if you remove yourself from people to talk to. I’ve now failed two more times, once when I accidentally said “banana” in answer to a question about a smoothie, and once when I said “wow” after the “neighbour”, having decided to move our conversation entirely to text, spelled mediocre “medioker”. But on the principle that there’s no such thing as failure, only learning, I now know my highest values, from three data points: manners, nutrition and spelling.
