Christmas 1995 - 29 December 1995

If I were asked what was most memorable about this Christmas, I should have to say an experience unknown to most people in a temperate climate, the experience of absolute silence. I see frowns on the faces of one or two listening friends, and non friends and a beloved friend, an old P.G. Wodehouse type, exploding, absolute silence? What absolute twaddle is the man going on about now?

Well I was sitting in a room, in a typical white painted wooden old colonial New England house on a little hilltop in northern Vermont, looking out of high Georgian windows through narrowed eyelids, simply because what I saw through the windows was blinding whiteness, a world, a planet of snow rolling away as a white valley up into the wooded foothills, all the trees having branches like drooping swords of snow, and on beyond, up the distant white mountains to, as Johnny Mercer said, "A blue umbrella sky".

It was Christmas morning and the family, the father, the grandmother, the three young girls have gone off with their mother, who by now though a year short of being a master – why not mistress of divinity – is qualified to conduct a service, which she does and presumably did. Later on, she will have to drive off alone and run a wedding. Mother of five, cook, maid, laundress, bottle washer, divinity student, workaholic, she yet enjoys what amounts to, in unpredictability, the life of a doctor on call. Tonight who knows there maybe a dying to attend? Tonight, we the rest of us will have the goose or turkey or whatever and the pudding is already in the pot ready for the steaming.

My mother's recipe by the way, amended and elaborated down the years and soon to have the amendment of a swirl of brandy – an addition that would have sent my dear Westerly mother into intensive care. On Christmas Day alone, my daughter will have driven in all, about 120 miles and someone may say, through all that snow! They've had 40 inches in the past three weeks!

No not through. No wonder the highest tax bite on Vermont is, is for road maintenance. In winter modest snowfall or blizzard alike you can hear in the middle of the night, the snow ploughs out, the great huge trucks like moving houses on the federal divided highways, driving a constant shower of snow high as a waterfall in front of the main plough, and depositing it as a continuous high rampart on each side of the highways. Then the state's own roads have other ploughs and the county roads the same and the small climbing hilly roads, they too are laboured on by night and day till the storm is done. The truth is, if it were not so, life and work in Vermont indeed in over about half the American landscape would come to a halt. Even then, if you don't have a four wheel drive as well as snow tyres you're not going anywhere. So they went off to church and I, who in my boyhood went without protest to church three times every Sunday, have been indulged in the last few years as a qualified penitent or perhaps an old sinner beyond redemption. I stayed home and as I say listened to the silence.

I will now for the sake of my P.G. Wodehouse friend, explain what I meant by saying that this experience was one I've not had since I was last up in Vermont at a similar snow-ladened white Christmas. Radio engineers, broadcasters and perhaps actors will now know what I'm talking about. Indoors, it's any studio that is, as the engineers say, 'dead', having an acoustical low background noise that only some dogs can hear. Most rooms we think of as being quiet are not so to a recording engineer, he can hear a car changing gears five blocks away.

The most unlikely sound crisis I can remember was when we were filming a whole episode about the California gold rush. At one point, I was telling about some of the families, the wagon teams who decided to take a short cut through the California desert and follow the humble river, till they discovered too late, that it became a fetid marsh and a sink, so they had to walk 65 miles without water. Animals died, so did children, so did some men and women who had by that time simply had it. And the survivors, before they mooched on, banged wooden posts in the ground and with a hot poker inscribed a made up name on them for an imaginary town, because you couldn't write home to Hamburg or Cornwall and say: "Sorry that your son Fred died nowhere." It's the most pathetic episode of the gold rush and on an old map you can still see these invented town names, no town of course was there, no building, just the bones of mules and cross sticks to mark the buried bodies of the unlucky, endurance, fortitude's last gasp.

To film this, I walked off, way away from the crew into the desert till I was a moving midget. The main thing, tough I can tell you, a stranger, it was mighty quiet. Well you know it wasn't. By the time I came into full view and then close-up and the scene was on film, the director told me that it looked fine but they could never get silence, the recorder heard a plane or two taking off from an army air force base 20 miles away, the desert was a sounding board. In the result, we kept the picture and put the sound in a studio in London, England that is!

Well I thought on Christmas morning how I wished I had my old sound men from the American crew, they could have filmed and recorded indoors or out. A passing car took about 10 seconds to get lost in the landscape of snow. After that, the snow provided the deadest studio I'd ever been in. I put my head out the front door, not much more, it was a bright piping two degrees, 30 below freezing, and I talked aloud, I said, "Good morning," and I said "good evening," there was not the faintest echo and nobody to listen, so I went inside and played the noblest single theme George Frideric Handel ever composed: the opening of the overture to The Water Music. And when that was over, I picked up the newspaper to catch up with the world, with America that is. I'd made a point after we got off the plane from New York and into the clean cold air, as intoxicating as an oxygen mask, I made a point of not reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or any other paper printed for the enlightenment of the city folk or of anyone beyond rural Vermont. There was delivered, by a well wrapped up elf every morning, the local paper and there was news enough of America to chew on.

As the 96th annual meeting of the local Vermont Audubon christmas bird count was about, this year. to field ten teams over a designated circle with a diameter of 15 miles. Last year they'd spotted 54 species including lots of northern shrikes, bohemian waxwings, pine grosbeaks, the pine siskin and a peregrine falcon. At the end of this year's outing, there was to be a countdown pot luck supper.

Hello! Here was a state of Vermont record. Muzzle loaders took 661 bucks, in addition 1,438 antlerless deer by muzzle loaders with special permits. The 1995 bow and arrow kill was just over 5,000 deer and all in all it says here: "The total number of white tails taken in Vermont during the 1995 season, which runs from the end of October into December should exceed 18,000, which is a state record." There was no sound, no whimper in the paper or in life from animal lovers. On the contrary, the environmentalists even breathed relief. Vermont is so heavily overrun with deer that unless so many thousands are shot, the herd suffer a lingering death from starvation.

The day after Christmas, we visited an old couple, very old friends who've moved into an old folk's home complete with movie theatre, infirmary, gymnasium, library, sauna, knitting room, dining room – rather lush, greatly varied menu, central air conditioning all round the year.

The day after, we took the plane and zoomed back to what they strangely call "civilisation". Civilisation and the New York Times and the hourly news on the telly – I'd also made a point of not watching television news either. All we saw on the screen was a rented movie called While You Were Sleeping. Throughout the movie, the whole family slept, so it will take time to catch up with the audio of the unemployed federal workers in the government shutdown. In Washington, several thousand of them staged a new kind of protest, a work-in.

The crime news, good news for once. There, a lawyer working for the state of Texas, was troubled to discover corruption in a department of the government. He reported it to higher-ups. Nothing happened. He tried again, nothing. He persisted, he was fired, he lost his pay. He lost his home, for he decided to sue the state for wrongful dismissal. It took time and it cost loads of money. At the end of two years he was living in a trailer, a caravan, n'est-ce pas. Just recently his case came to trial. The judge awarded him, and an appeals court upheld the sum of, wait for it 21 million dollars. He's moving out of his caravan.

Bosnia, well so far there's nothing but good news there, except for the soldiers who woke up under floods. The most memorable item anyway was a 20 second bit on the evening news. A reporter with a microphone aloft stopped a black soldier at a coffee store. The soldier was a benevolent character with a chuckling expression and gold rimmed spectacles. The reporter wanted to know what did the soldier think his mission was, the gold rims turned to the little roadside counter and said: "Cheeseburger and a coke to go," he chuckled again. "My mission why man I'm gonna save the free world and everybody else".

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