DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 29

The Internal Dull Roar

I was lying in bed in that uncertain hour before morning had properly made up its mind, watching a thin line of light press against the curtains and wondering why, from all the matters available, my mind had selected Richard Jones. There was work sitting five paces away in the office, retirement still requiring decisions I had imagined would somehow make themselves, and the usual collection of tasks I had shifted into the comfortable but increasingly crowded category of tomorrow. None of those received the attention they probably deserved. Instead, I went back more than fifty years to a classroom at Boorowa Central School and the first time I heard a teacher appear to surrender control of the room before he had even begun. The encounter had seemed nonsensical at the time, but lying there with the house quiet and my head anything but, it no longer felt quite so accidental.

Richard Jones had walked into a room already alive with the ordinary unrest of schoolboys. Chairs scraped, voices crossed, somebody laughed at something that would not have survived explanation, and there was probably a dispute over a ruler, pencil or other object whose ownership had suddenly become a matter of constitutional importance. I expected him to impose silence because that was what teachers did when they intended to teach, or at least when they wanted us to believe they were in charge. He looked over the room with no great alarm and said, “Keep it down to a dull roar.” I remember being almost offended by the standard he had set. He had not asked for attention, discipline or even the appearance of civilisation, only that the chaos remain within manageable acoustic limits.

My primary schooling had taught me that learning sounded like silence. There was the scratch of pencils, the turn of a page, the teacher’s voice and the reassuring little pause before an answer was confirmed as right or wrong. I understood that arrangement because it had rules, and rules gave me somewhere solid to stand when other parts of school life were less dependable. Richard Jones seemed to have entered the room carrying weather rather than order, and I could not see how anyone was expected to learn in the middle of it. He was asking me to think while other people were still talking, which felt rather like being asked to thread a needle in the back of a ute travelling over corrugations. It may have been possible, but I could not imagine why a sensible person would choose to make it the method.

The phrase stayed with me partly because I disapproved of it so strongly. I had arrived in secondary school already unsettled by illness, absence and the discovery that the tidy methods which had served me well did not guarantee the same place in a larger and noisier hierarchy. I wanted the classroom to remain the one area where the old certainty still applied, where effort led to an answer and the answer could be checked against something more reliable than the mood of the boys around me. Jones seemed to regard certainty as something to be examined rather than protected. He did not merely want an answer returned to him in good condition, with the corners unbent and the correct spelling attached. He wanted to know what I thought it meant, why I thought it, and whether it could survive somebody else thinking differently.

He was an English teacher, although that description never quite contained him. Richard carried enough self-regard to make modesty seem like an administrative error, and his early E Type Jaguar did little to soften the impression that he had been delivered to Boorowa from another, more theatrical world. Later there was a Jeep Wagon, which suggested that even Richard had eventually accepted country roads were unlikely to alter themselves for the sake of elegance. I found him irritating, impressive and difficult to dismiss, sometimes within the same lesson and occasionally within the same sentence. He seemed to enjoy disturbing any answer that had become too comfortable, including his own if the discussion remained interesting. That may have been the beginning of my education in the uncomfortable truth that a person did not have to be entirely likeable to be entirely useful.

One of the things he did was pull poetry away from the solemn shelf where schools tended to keep it and place it beside contemporary music, where it had to compete with electric guitars, stage make-up and performers who understood that an audience could be reached through theatre as readily as through rhyme. A John Donne love poem might be followed by an Alice Cooper ballad involving a black widow spider, which was not a pairing likely to appear on the same concert bill but made surprising sense once both were reduced to words on a page. Richard was not asking us to pretend the centuries between them did not exist, nor was he suggesting every song lyric deserved to sit beside Shakespeare simply because somebody had found a tune for it. He was asking what the words were doing, how they were doing it and whether the approved label attached to one piece had allowed us to stop looking at it properly. For someone who liked clear categories, it was another unnecessary disturbance, which probably meant it was doing me some good.

He might just as readily have placed Hamlet’s great soliloquy beside Vincent Price solemnly extolling the rise of his precious Black Widow. One voice belonged to a Danish prince contemplating whether existence was worth the burden, while the other came from a horror-film actor giving grandeur, menace and almost affectionate dignity to a spider most people would have removed with a shoe. The distance between them appeared enormous until the performances were placed side by side and the voices were treated as instruments rather than cultural rankings. Both depended on rhythm, pause, image, darkness and the authority of a speaker drawing an audience towards something it might otherwise prefer not to examine. One was accepted as high culture and the other arrived through an Alice Cooper album, but Richard could make us see that neither worked by accident.

Vincent Price could make a shopping list sound like the final warning before civilisation collapsed, which gave him a natural advantage over most classroom readings of Shakespeare. Hamlet, usually delivered by an actor carrying several centuries of expectation, had his own theatrical weight, but once the voice was removed the words had to establish that weight again. The same applied to Alice Cooper when the music, costumes and stage spectacle disappeared. What remained was structure, choice, suggestion, threat, desire, fear and the deliberate movement of language towards an emotional response. Richard made us look beneath the packaging, although at that age I still preferred some packaging to others, and a Black Widow introduced by Vincent Price was always going to begin with a stronger hand than a melancholy prince wearing tights.

That exercise unsettled another certainty I had not known I was carrying. I had assumed poetry belonged to old men with collars, dead women looking wistfully from textbook portraits, and people who appeared to have been given too much time to think about clouds. Music belonged to us, even when it came from performers old enough to have mortgages, managers and complicated tax arrangements. Richard ignored the border and asked the same questions of both sides. Once the words were placed on the page, respectability could no longer answer on their behalf. A poem or song had to show how it created its effect, and the fact that generations of teachers had already approved one of them did not relieve it of the obligation.

The words had to be examined for what they were doing rather than for the reputation they had accumulated. Why had that image been chosen, what was being hidden beneath the joke, where did the rhythm change, and did the speaker mean what he appeared to mean? There was rarely one clean answer waiting at the back of the book, which was inconvenient for a boy trained to believe that every worthwhile question eventually submitted to marking. An interpretation had to be built, supported and then exposed to challenge, and the first conclusion was often only the beginning of the work. I could reach conclusions quickly, but Richard required me to slow down and make the pathway visible to people who had not travelled it at the same speed. It was stimulating, annoying and, although I would not have admitted it at the time, a considerable relief.

I did not understand that he was giving me a method I would spend the rest of my life using. I thought we were discussing poems, songs and the occasional overworked metaphor while the room continued its dull roar around us. In reality, I was being taught to hear the difference between what was said and what was meant, between the surface of a sentence and the pressure sitting underneath it. People would later bring me balance sheets that said one thing, bank accounts that said another and explanations attempting to negotiate peace between the two. Richard had begun teaching me to distrust the neatness of the surface long before I knew I would spend a career looking at numbers. The accountant came much later, but the habit of listening for what had not been said was already forming.

The classroom noise stopped when the bell rang, but the thinking it introduced did not. Facts that had once sat obediently in rows began arguing among themselves, and answers which appeared complete from one direction looked less secure when approached from another. Something could be technically correct and still fail to explain what had happened, while an opinion could sound convincing until somebody asked it to produce evidence. I began to understand that black and white were not always opposites sitting neatly at either end of a page. Sometimes they were the starting points of a difficult discussion, and sometimes grey was the convenient fog people created when they did not want to admit a line existed. Even then I was more comfortable when the line could be found, although Richard was making certain I understood that finding it and proving it were separate tasks.

Years later, at Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, on the campus that would become part of Charles Sturt University, I found myself in another room where the answer was not always the point. By then I was working towards my degree in Business Studies and had discovered taxation in a very different realm, which is what happens when a restless mind meets legislation written by committees with a shared suspicion of straightforward sentences. Accounting had structure and numbers eventually had to reconcile, even when the people responsible for producing them had shown no similar commitment. Taxation contained argument. It offered words, definitions, exceptions, qualifications, interpretation provisions and enough cross-references to make a sensible person consider another profession. I found it fascinating, which probably says as much about me as any IQ score ever could.

Professor Morrow opened one of those early lectures by telling us that tax was amoral. The statement landed with the same disruptive force as Richard Jones accepting a dull roar, because I had assumed law and morality at least nodded to each other in the corridor. Morrow’s point was more exact than the statement first appeared. Tax law did not care whether a person was admirable, unpleasant or morally bankrupt; it cared whether the facts brought that person within the words Parliament had enacted. The system might pursue Al Capone through taxation when other routes failed, but it was not passing judgement on his soul. It was applying rules to income, deductions, structures and obligations, which was a colder exercise than justice and could sometimes be a more effective one.

Professor Morrow had what I understood to be an eidetic memory, and watching him use it was both impressive and faintly unfair. I would put forward an interpretation of a section, pleased with the line I had developed, and he would lean back in his chair as though the legislation had been projected onto the inside of his eyelids. After a pause he would recite the relevant wording, bring in a definition from somewhere I had not yet reached and ask what happened to my argument if another provision was read beside it. There was no dramatic flourish and no attempt to embarrass me in front of anyone. He was not trying to catch me out for sport, although he was perfectly capable of enjoying the chase. He wanted to know whether the thought could carry its own weight once the entire structure was allowed into the room.

One debate stayed with me because it captured the problem more clearly than many of the answers I later learned for examinations. The legislation appeared to allow losses to move between companies where the ownership looked the same, and I constructed an example involving a husband and wife each holding the same shares across several companies. One company made a profit, another made losses, and the plain reading seemed to suggest the losses might be available across the group. It was a practical arrangement which made sense when viewed from the kitchen table of the family who owned the businesses. Professor Morrow listened, leaned back and began dismantling the apparent simplicity, not because the example was foolish but because the legislation was more particular than the ordinary use of the word group. Once the definitions and interpretation provisions were admitted, the structure being described was not merely a collection of companies with the same two names on the share register, but something closer to a chain of wholly owned subsidiaries within the statutory meaning.

The words on the first page had not changed, yet the answer had. What looked black and white when read alone became less certain once another page was brought beside it, and the grey sat between what an ordinary taxpayer might believe Parliament intended and what Parliament had actually defined. I argued the practical logic, the apparent policy and the result a business owner might reasonably expect from the way the measure had been discussed. Morrow kept taking me back to the architecture, showing where one provision leaned on another and where an ordinary word had been given a statutory meaning that no longer behaved in an ordinary way. He was never satisfied with my conclusion merely because it sounded commercially sensible. At the same time, he was not interested in hiding behind a literal reading if the literal reading failed to answer the wider question.

The debate itself became the answer, although it took me some time to recognise that because education had trained me to believe answers should eventually stand still. With Morrow, the point was to test every support, remove the weak ones and understand precisely where the conclusion might fail if the facts shifted. He was teaching us to advise rather than merely repeat, and advice required more than remembering a section number. A practitioner had to know what the law said, what the client had actually done, what argument could reasonably connect the two and where interpretation stopped being professional judgement and became wishful thinking with a fee attached. That last boundary was not always announced by a sign. Sometimes it was only visible after the client had already begun driving towards it.

I found Morrow exhilarating because I did not have to cut the thought down before placing it in front of him. I could follow a branch, add a qualification, test an exception and return to the original premise without watching his eyes glaze over or sensing that the room wanted the conclusion delivered before the reasoning became inconvenient. He could keep pace and often moved ahead, which was a relief rather than a threat. To describe him as an intellectual equal may sound as though I am awarding both of us medals, but that is not what I mean. I mean he was one of the rare people with whom I felt no need to apologise for the speed, complexity or persistence of the thought. There was no requirement to remove half the branches before the tree was permitted through the door.

We had long discussions about the implementation of legislation as opposed to the law in its written form. Parliament could produce words, the Tax Office could administer them, courts could interpret them and practitioners could still face a client whose facts refused to behave like the examples in the explanatory material. The question was often not simply whether a section existed, but how it operated when it met a business, a family, a transaction, a mistake or a person determined to see only the interpretation producing the smallest tax bill. Written law had the advantage of remaining on the page. Implementation had to deal with incomplete records, mixed motives, cash shortages and the fact that human beings generally prefer certainty at precisely the moment certainty is least available. That was the coalface, although it involved fewer hard hats and rather more paper cuts.

Peter Clyne represented another version of the same mental challenge. The Artful Dodger, as he became known, seemed to regard the edge of taxation legislation not as a warning but as an invitation to inspect the view. He pushed interpretations towards their limits and sometimes beyond the level most practitioners would have considered comfortable, leaving the law, the courts or Parliament to decide how much space actually existed. I did not admire every outcome and never regarded aggression as a substitute for ethics. What interested me was the refusal to assume the accepted reading was the only reading merely because most people had agreed to stop asking questions. There was a restless intelligence in that, even when the destination it reached was not one I would have recommended to a client.

There was also a lesson in Clyne’s approach which required more care than admiration. A person could test the architecture of the law without pretending the law had disappeared, and a practitioner could search for an available path without driving a client over a cliff merely to prove the path was technically open. The cautious accountants who influenced me understood some of Clyne’s thinking but also understood professional responsibility, insurance, reputation and the difference between a clever argument and a sustainable position. The edge of the envelope mattered, but so did its contents and the person expected to live with the result after the adviser had gone home. There were always practitioners who enjoyed being the cleverest person in the room until the room was replaced by a courtroom. Intelligence without restraint could become another form of stupidity, only with better stationery and a larger invoice.

Those years gave my mind a place where its restlessness looked useful rather than merely inconvenient. A statute could be pulled apart, a definition compared, an intention questioned and a practical result tested against the written rule. There was pleasure in that, particularly when somebody such as Morrow was willing to remain inside the argument rather than demanding the smallest acceptable version of it. I did not feel superior during those discussions. I felt engaged, which was a very different experience and one I did not encounter often enough to take for granted. The mind did not have to be slowed or disguised; it could be worked until the thought either stood up or admitted it could not.

The difficulty was that most of life did not operate like Professor Morrow’s office. Clients did not usually arrive hoping to spend an afternoon strengthening the argument against their preferred conclusion, and business partners did not always regard challenge as a sign of respect. Committees were rarely improved, at least in their own opinion, by being told the motion under discussion rested on an assumption nobody had bothered to test. People said they wanted clarity, but often they wanted reassurance wearing clarity’s coat. They wanted an answer, provided the answer did not disturb the decision already made. The room could tolerate analysis until analysis threatened to alter the furniture.

That was where the dull roar moved from the classroom into my own head. In the room I learned to remain composed, listen to the full explanation and resist announcing the ending while the other person was still introducing the cast. Inside my mind, every earlier version of the same problem was already awake. Figures connected themselves, explanations were compared, likely consequences lined up and several possible responses argued about which one could be spoken without losing the client. The process was rarely as orderly as it appeared from the chair on the other side of the desk. Thought, rage, worry, memory, resentment, duty and exhaustion occupied the same space, and none of them showed much respect for meeting procedure.

A client might explain that one poor month resulted from weather, another from a late-paying customer, another from staff shortages and the next from an unexpected expense. Each explanation could be true, which was what made the conversation difficult. The pattern could still say the business was running out of money, and my mind might reach that conclusion before the client had finished explaining the second month. Professional judgement reminded me that saying it too quickly could sound dismissive of every hardship being described. I therefore slowed the thought, asked more questions and tried to make the pattern visible without making the person feel foolish for not having seen it earlier. The task was not only to know where the figures were heading, but to find language that might persuade the client to come with me.

Sometimes the client did come with me, although not always for the reasons I imagined. At other times the softened warning became permission to delay because “we should review this soon” does not create the same urgency as “you are heading directly into a brick wall and appear to be accelerating.” The stronger version might have been accurate, but accuracy does not automatically make a sentence useful. I learned to lower the volume, remove the branches and present the smallest version of the conclusion the room might tolerate. There were occasions when this was good communication and others when it was probably cowardice disguised as diplomacy. What remained unsaid did not disappear merely because the meeting ended. It joined the roar and waited for the wall to arrive.

That accumulation was not visible from the other side of the desk. The client saw an accountant taking notes, asking questions and perhaps making a dry remark when the tension needed puncturing. Staff saw somebody continuing to work through deadlines, while family saw the familiar mixture of busyness, irritation and responsibility that had become part of the household weather. Competence covered a great deal because competence looks reassuring from a distance, particularly when the person displaying it has spent years hiding strain behind completed work, returned telephone calls and answers delivered with apparent certainty. The more reliably I carried the load, the less reason anyone had to wonder what carrying it involved. I had helped create that misunderstanding because I preferred being seen as capable to being seen as overwhelmed.

Beneath that competence was a drive I did not always understand, something not unlike the line Vincent Price recited with such chilling satisfaction in the preface to Alice Cooper’s Black Widow: “an inborn need to dominate, possess.” In my case it was not primarily a need to dominate people, although I would be dishonest if I claimed I had never tried to dominate a discussion once I believed the evidence was firmly on my side. It was a need to dominate the problem, possess the facts, understand every moving part and force chaos into a shape that could be explained. I wanted to own the issue sufficiently that it could no longer surprise me, damage the client or expose some failure of judgement I should have seen coming. The drive was less dramatic than Vincent Price made it sound, but it was no less persistent for lacking background music.

That compulsion could appear admirable because it produced answers, prevented mistakes and kept matters moving after other people had run out of interest or energy. It could also become exhausting, obsessive and difficult for those close to me to comprehend. A matter was rarely finished simply because the meeting had ended or the file had been returned to the cabinet. My mind continued circling it, searching for the loose thread, the missing assumption or the sentence somebody had spoken too casually. Those on the other side of the desk could leave the problem with me and return to their business, but I carried it away as though accepting responsibility for solving it meant accepting temporary ownership of every possible consequence. Temporary ownership had a habit of becoming a long lease.

The people closest to me often saw the outward signs without seeing the machinery producing them. They saw the impatience when I was interrupted, the distance when I was physically present but still working through an argument, or the irritation that seemed larger than the immediate event deserved. They could not always see that several problems were running at once, each demanding to be controlled before it could be safely released. Even I mistook that compulsion for dedication because dedication was a more comfortable word and looked better on a professional biography. There was pride in being the person who could take hold of the mess, but there was fear as well, the belief that if I loosened my grip something important might escape. I could be sitting in the room with my family while part of me remained on the other side of a client’s desk, still trying to rewrite a warning nobody had heard.

Nobody heard the full argument continuing after the conversation had ended. They did not hear me testing whether a different phrase might have been understood, whether a firmer warning would have mattered or whether the whole exercise had only delayed an impact that was always coming. The internal cross-examination could continue for hours, with me serving as adviser, critic, judge and occasionally hostile witness. The drive to dominate and possess the problem meant no answer was permitted to rest until every alternative had been interrogated, and even then the acquittal was usually temporary. From the other side of the desk it looked like competence because the work was completed and the voice remained steady. Inside my head it was closer to a permanent occupation, with no agreed hours and very poor leave arrangements.

There were nights when I lay in bed replaying conversations with the same persistence I had once brought to Morrow’s questions. The difference was that Morrow’s debates had an intellectual cleanliness to them because we were testing a provision, and if the argument failed it failed without taking a payroll, mortgage or family with it. Professional life attached people to the conclusion. A wrong interpretation could cost money, but a correct warning delivered badly could cost trust, while a correct warning ignored might still leave me carrying the rescue when the consequence arrived. The law could be examined in the abstract, but the client’s bank account never had that luxury. By the time I was lying awake, the issue was no longer a question from a lecture; it belonged to somebody who expected me to know what happened next.

The external world demanded composure because people do not generally pay an adviser to experience their panic for them. They wanted steadiness, judgement and the sense that whatever they had done could be placed into some understandable order. I could usually provide that, even when my private reaction was considerably less refined. There is a professional distance between saying, “This outcome was foreseeable from the cash-flow pattern,” and saying, “I told you this would happen while you were still choosing the paint colour for the wall.” I became skilled at living in that distance and occasionally even found the correct words. Skill, however, did not mean the unspoken version vanished; it simply meant I knew enough not to say it aloud.

Some of the rage came from being ignored, although honesty requires me to admit some came from the offence of not being immediately recognised as right. Those are not the same thing, and it would be too convenient to pretend my frustration was always noble concern for other people. I could be impatient, blunt and too certain that the speed of my conclusion proved the quality of it. Richard Jones had taught me to show the working and Professor Morrow had taught me to test the argument, yet there were times when I wanted the room to accept the result without requiring either. I could see the wall and believe the sight of it excused the way I described it. Self-awareness is useful, but it has never been a complete cure for personality, particularly when personality has already prepared a supporting schedule.

I was also wrong at times, and the speed of the mind did not make those errors smaller. A pattern can appear obvious because the mind has selected the evidence it likes, and intelligence can build a magnificent argument around a false premise if pride is allowed to chair the meeting. Morrow’s questions remained important because they demanded that I turn the challenge back on myself. What fact had I assumed, what definition had I overlooked, and what would I say if the same argument were presented by someone whose conclusion I disliked? There were occasions when my certainty weakened under that examination and others when it became stronger. The internal roar was not only the sound of other people failing to listen; it was also the sound of me trying to decide whether I had earned the certainty I was carrying.

Black and white became both an anchor and a burden. In a grey world, the person who insists there is still a difference between right and wrong can make everybody uncomfortable, particularly when the grey is serving a useful commercial, emotional or political purpose. Without some line, however carefully examined, there is nothing solid to hold when the room begins moving around. The difficulty lies in deciding whether the line belongs to law, ethics, judgement, fear or personal preference, because those categories can imitate each other when enough is at stake. Tax might be amoral, as Morrow said, but the practitioner applying it is not relieved of morality merely because the section number is correct. Nor does a strong moral reaction automatically produce the correct technical answer, which was another irritation the law refused to remove.

The same tension moved well beyond taxation. Family decisions, business ventures, partnerships, boards, community organisations and retirement all presented versions of the same questions about what was right, what was permitted, what was practical and what people would accept. I could often see competing paths and the likely point where one of them met a wall, but seeing it did not give me control over who chose the path. The effort of deciding how much to say, when to say it and how heavily to soften it became another permanent background process, like a computer program continuing after everyone else had closed their screens. Some days it operated quietly and on others it used all the available memory. There was no simple switch marked stop analysing, despite the number of people who might have found one useful.

Depression fitted easily into that environment because it did not need to stop me functioning. It could sit beneath the work while I answered calls, solved problems, wrote letters, attended meetings and appeared to be coping with the ordinary competence people expected. The dull roar was not always sadness, and it was rarely a dramatic desire to withdraw from life altogether. More often it was the exhaustion of never achieving internal silence, the sense that every unfinished argument remained active and the suspicion that usefulness had become the only reliable way to keep the noise from turning inward. I did not necessarily look depressed because I was too busy being useful, and usefulness has always presented well from the public side of the glass. Work gave the mind external walls to study, which was preferable to allowing it to inspect every crack in me.

Responsibility became a form of movement, and movement could pass for wellness for a very long time. There was always somebody needing an answer, a return requiring lodgement, a business needing interpretation or a family matter that could be made slightly less difficult if I took hold of one end. Those tasks were real and often worthwhile, so I do not want to recast a lifetime of contribution as merely avoidance. People were helped, businesses survived, families made decisions and problems became manageable because I stayed with them. The difficulty was that usefulness became the volume control. When other people’s problems were loud enough, I did not have to hear my own with the same clarity, and nobody questioned the arrangement because from the outside it appeared productive.

The cost was not always dramatic enough to be recognised as a cost. It appeared in tiredness that sleep did not repair, irritation looking for a smaller event on which to land and the inability to remain fully present when the mind had decided another matter was more urgent. It sat in the few minutes after a telephone call when I continued the conversation alone, improving both sides until nobody involved sounded much like the person who had actually spoken. It appeared when a family member asked a simple question and received an answer shaped by three unrelated problems already in progress. None of this made me a victim of my own intelligence, which would be far too comfortable an explanation. It made me a person who had built a life around controlling complexity and then discovered complexity had been allowed to move in permanently.

Retirement was supposed to lower the noise, although it mainly removed some of the external soundproofing. The office became quieter, formal deadlines reduced and the professional identity began loosening, yet the internal processes continued reporting for duty as though nobody had advised them of the change. I could still analyse a conversation before breakfast, redesign a system during lunch and revisit a decision in bed long after everyone else had accepted the day was over. A mind trained for decades to look for patterns does not retire because the calendar has been altered. It simply finds new material, and when material is scarce it is quite capable of reprocessing the old stock. The absence of a client did not guarantee the absence of a problem; sometimes it merely meant I had to supply both.

There was another complication in retirement because the old methods had given me identity as well as purpose. I had been the person who knew where to look, what to ask and how to place chaos into an order the client could recognise. Removing some of that work did not automatically produce peace. It created space, and space can be generous or threatening depending on what is waiting to occupy it. The dull roar had once been partly drowned by deadlines, telephone calls and the steady demand to become useful to somebody else. When those softened, the mind did not become grateful. It began examining what remained, including the possibility that I had spent so long translating myself for other rooms that I was no longer certain what the unedited version sounded like.

Writing has become one way of moving some of that noise onto the page. It allows the full thought to exist before it is shortened for a client meeting, softened for a committee or disguised as humour because the room has already shown signs of becoming defensive. That does not mean every thought deserves publication, and age has not converted irritation into wisdom by automatic process. The page still requires evidence, shape and restraint, much as Richard Jones required when he took away the music and left us with the words. It also permits a thought to wander far enough to discover that the sentence I began with is not the sentence I finally believe. In conversation that movement can look like indecision; on the page it sometimes becomes honesty.

I can see now why the memory of Richard Jones returned while I was lying in bed. He had given the noise a name before I understood I would eventually carry it inside me, and he had done so with the careless confidence of a teacher describing nothing more important than the acceptable volume of a classroom. Professor Morrow later showed me that noise could be productive when it was allowed to become argument rather than merely frustration. Between them sat the continuing problem of my life: how to let the mind work at full strength without allowing it to damage every room it entered, including the room inside my own head. There was never going to be a final answer because the circumstances kept changing and so did I. At best there was a better-tested way of carrying the question, with the occasional day when it did not need to be carried quite so tightly.

I can still see the boy in that first classroom regarding a dull roar as evidence that civilisation was ending. He wanted silence because silence made the rules easier to see, and he believed the rules would protect him if he learned them thoroughly enough. Life taught him otherwise, though not completely, because rules, definitions and the line between black and white sometimes remained the only solid objects available in a room determined to become grey. What changed was the understanding that no line survives without interpretation and no interpretation survives merely because the person offering it has spoken loudly. He also learned that some rooms would resist the line because it was wrong, while others would resist it because it was inconvenient. The difficult part was knowing which room he was standing in before the wall arrived.

The roar is quieter on some days than others. Work can reduce it, writing can organise it, humour can take some of the pressure out of it, and the people closest to me can interrupt it without always knowing they have done so. It never disappears completely, and after this long I might be suspicious if it did. There is always another thought testing the previous one, another memory attaching itself to the present, another worry asking for evidence and another duty waiting to be weighed against the cost of carrying it. I no longer expect some final silence to arrive with retirement, age or the completion of a manuscript, because the mind has never shown any intention of becoming that cooperative. Dealing with the roar is not a separate part of life that I will eventually finish and place behind me; dealing with the roar is the sum total of life as it is for me.