QUIET PLEASE!!!!

I consider my personality to have been formed by Dr Seuss, and I have no complaints about that. The Cat in The Hat, with his sly anarchy ("I know some good tricks...I will show them to you, your mother will not mind at all if I do,") remains to this day my role model. But today it's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas I'm thinking about.

The Grinch hates Christmas for the same reason the rest of us do (Christmas-lovers may absent themselves from the discussion at this point): "Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise! That's one thing he hated! The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!"

The soundtrack to life is an incessant mumbling -- TV, Radio, newspapers, books, e-mail, facebook, bills, obligations, appointments, arrangements. Information, conversation. Noise. Always worse in the run-up to Christmas, where the tinkling of tinsel and the jostling of Christmas carols drives a whole nation to the brink of madness.

But ideas need peace and quiet to grow. So for a few hours a day, at least, I'm turning it off. All of it.

Shhhhhhh.....