Amazingly, our office did fall completely silent for the full three minutes. A real could-have-heard-a-finger-on-a-keyboard sort of silence. Eight people in a big open office all sat looking at their desks or out of the window, feeling a little awkward. Our visiting student from Singapore, head bowed in prayer. I gazed at my screensaver for today - a window at Durham Cathedral that looks out onto a peaceful green lawn in an inner courtyard - and looked out of the window across our own little patch of green to the offices on the other side. Just checking if other colleagues were observing the silence.... Ran through some of the images we've seen on TV, imagined those bodies lying there and the pain of all those hundreds of thousands of people who've lost so much. Does our silence help them, I wonder?
My musings are interrupted by the cackling laugh of a secretary round the corner and someone else asking if Doreen has those papers she needs. A door slams. The Amazonic secretary - the one that wears tight mini skirts over thumping great thighs - is heading for the bathroom. Obviously forgotten about the three minutes - or, like the colleague sitting next to me, doesn't see why she should observe something that's been imposed on us from management and the boffins at the European Union. Sacrilege. Though they do also have a point...
Here in Holland, we still observe a silence - two minutes - for those lost in the two World Wars. It does something for me.
Yes, I think big, international group silences are my sort of thing.
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