REAL SILENT NIGHT,PLEASE!!

REAL SILENT NIGHT,PLEASE!!

London is usually a very noisy city.Its everyday noise is the sound of sheer      commerce.The incessant hisses of cars or buses tyres on wet roads, trains      rushing across viaducts, dreary drone of planes above and chiefly the noise of people.On the streets, poeple walk shouting monologues into phone             earpieces. One call ends and another instantly begins. In warmer months      people are prone to open their windows and let their music billow through the entire street! Some people put their television up so loud that you may feel   that some politician is shouting at you personally! It is as if no one lives in   London for tranquility and people areunsettled by silence!                           
      Only on some rare occasions in deep winter London becomes silent when it is covered with thick snow. Snow forces us to stop and listen to silence.     
      And then comes Christmas and Boxing Day! The city suddenly goes quiet. London's background roar is as if extinguished. An entire city of eight million people comes to a complete and contended halt! Even the great wide river, my dear Thames, is noiseless, save for the feeble slurps of small waves sucking at the embankment wall. In the deepning indigo haze of a Christmas twilight, you look at those hundreds of little lights in the windows of all the riverside apartments and wonder how is it that so many thousands of people can be so very quiet.Has everyone reached to a silent understanding to keep the noise down?                                                                                                 
        And then you can savour the novelty of being able to walk down the    centre of the road, while listening to your own footsteps! The slippery frost makes even the dullest pavements glitter! You see more clearly the sombre, stern dignity of the City Wren Churches, the pride that lay behind their gothic spires. In the quiet, you are more aware of the city's great history and then realise that London is there for other more important reasons too!               

          Then I look above thankfully at the sky and suddenly a news item       comes to my mind. It is said that many rare species of birds have returned to the inner city in recent years.So, wouldn't it be nice if we could give them at least some patches of sound-proofed sylvan peace in certain quarters? the general pollution has come down considerably here in London. Couldn't the noise pollution come down a little too?...Oh, Let us have a Real Silent Night this Christmas,for God's merry Harbingers-the birds!                                   

                                                          WITH BEST WISHES!!
                         
                                                        

                                                                - AUTUMN ELIZA