Quiet

The Obsessive Diary · Aug 9, 2026 · 3m

I’ve come down to the farm for a few days. The silence is sweet music. When I arrived on Thursday afternoon I stopped on the stairs, listening. Nothing. No sirens wailing. No speeding BMWs down Ladbroke Grove. No warning of lorries reversing or sigh of the number 52 outside my door. No shouts. Five months into London life and my nervous system acclimatises to the insistence of noise with energetic certainty; I sleep through it, mostly, but paused mid-step on the stairs at the farm, black and white photographs lining the walls of childhood summers, my children growing frame by frame, every…