The headphones go in

You leave the house at ten past eight. Before the door has closed the headphones are in and the podcast is on, the one about history, or the one about the news, or whichever one is next in the queue. The walk to the car is four minutes. At the car the podcast comes through the speakers. At work you take the headphones out and, in the kitchen while the kettle boils, put them back in for the two minutes it takes. At lunch you're at the desk with a screen. At the post office there's a queue and the phone is out before you've joined it.

In the evening the radio goes on when you come in and stays on while you cook, though you couldn't say afterwards what was on it. In the shower there's a speaker. In bed there's an audiobook, set to stop after thirty minutes, and you're asleep before it does, and if you wake at three you put it on again. Somewhere in that day there was not one minute in which nothing was coming in. If you try to remember the last day that had one, you'll go back to spring, or a power cut, or being ill.

These are invented, but I'd be surprised if the shape were far off. Notice what's happened without anyone deciding it. Every quiet minute has a thing in it. Not because you chose each one, but because the fill has become what quiet is for, and a minute without it now feels like a minute with something wrong.

Some words. I'll call whatever goes into a quiet minute the fill, whether it's a podcast, the radio, a screen, an audiobook or music you're not listening to. A period with nothing on is a quiet stretch, and a small one is a quiet minute. Sound on in the background that nobody is attending to I'll call the hum. The restlessness in the first minutes with nothing on is the itch. Where your mind goes when nothing's put in it is the drift. What goes missing is the things that only happen in quiet, and chapter 18 lists them. A podcast or programme put on to be attended to is a chosen listen. And the fill going on without a decision, which is most of it, is the default.

Before you go on, do one thing. Tomorrow, keep a list of every quiet minute that could have been. The walk, the kettle, the queue, the shower, the wait, the drive, the last stretch in bed. Next to each, write what went into it. At the end of the day, count the ones that stayed empty. For most people who do this, the count is zero, and the list is longer than they'd have guessed. That's the habit, on a page, and it's what the rest of the book is about.