Silence

Silence is incredibly noisy. It should be called 'silence'. Just in this office silence, I can hear the multiple-layered rushing of the heating system, the tippy-tapping of my computer keys, the ack-acking of students sitting on the floor in the corridor chatting and laughing.
Every so often, a door bangs with a twang that indicates its resin-based construction and aluminium locking system.
I can't hear sounds from outside but I can see them. There's a row of plastic bags tied to the rail of a balcony over the way (why?) and I can imagine them rustling. Pigeons flap by (I'm on the third floor) busy doing nothing and I am certain that the roar of distant traffic forms an aural backdrop to it all.
The more you listen into silence, the more you hear. Now I can hear the sleeves of my jumper quietly whooshing across the desk and the sound of my watch, its quiet ticking merging into one long white noise.
The 'silent' central heating system reveals more sonic layers, appearing to clear its throat every few seconds and flushing in an indeterminate rhythm.

You might think I'm bored but I'm not. I've seen end to end students today and its nearly four o'clock. I didn't get a chance for a lunch break although I did eat some Pear and Almond Tart at my desk and I've drunk a bottle of water. In between the students I re-wrote something for the third time and responded to a whole lot of emails, and in the course of that read the very sad news that Bob Crow had died.

Bob Crow has been a one-man opposition to our dreadful government and our abysmal mayor and has looked after the safety of the London tube system. Now he's gone, that will be come impersonal and unsafe just as the abysmal mayor has always wanted it to be, in order to make more money for its private investors (it's called, in doublespeak, 'saving money'; imagine saving money at the expense of passengers [scrub that, customers], in piggy banks clad in pin-striped City-investor suits).

After that rantlet, I'm going back to listening. Then I'm going totake in a student song that's shaping up along the corridor past the sitting students.
(They take up a lot of corridor space with their sprawling and every time I pick my way through them, I say 'Crunch, crunch, crunch, broken fingers' which makes them whip their hands away in nanoseconds).