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If being silenced is really beginning to unnerve you, then you could always follow the example of many cartoon characters and turn your silence into a virtue which will have your followers loving every unspoken moment and your detractors falling over themselves to act upon your unspoken words of wisdom.  

Take Dumbo for example.  Whilst ridiculed for his huge ears, he spoke volumes through his hugely expressive eyes: try cultivating those kind of looks next time your detractors try to silence you into submission.  It might not work on the hardest of hearts but you’ll develop a great fan base on Instagram and win you a lot of popularity far and wide. If that doesn’t work, just grow your ears to unbelievable proportions and you’ll get to fly around the world with your wondrous stories of expanding ears.

If the Dumbo Strategy doesn’t work, you could always opt for the Gromit Strategy.  His silence highlights his intense intelligence and wordly-wise-ness.  He doesn’t need to speak, bark or yap: he just has to look at you, quizzically raise one stop-mo eyebrow and you’ll follow his every bidding, convinced he’s the brightest spark in the show and worth following, however much silence he holds. Great for those strategy meetings when everyone all around you is barking, woofing or yapping.

Of course, if cutesy silent animals aren’t your bag, then you could do a lot worse than opt for the Maggie Simpson Strategy. Despite her silence, Maggie is frequently the focus of many episodes of The Simpsons and as such becomes the engine which drives the narrative with such a ferociousness logic you’re left gasping for breath at the end of the episode.  She’s also clearly the most intelligent one in the Simpson Household / Springfield / World that it’s no wonder the writers muted her.  Just imagine the havoc she could wreak if she were allowed to speak!

The Mighty Creatives staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Whilst there are at least 9 techniques you can use to shut people up (or that people will use on you to shut you up), perhaps none is more absolute than the desire to wipe out the entire human race altogether.  If achieved, it would at least quieten down those pesky troublemakers in our midst who insist on asking awkward questions at the most inopportune of times.  Rhetorical devices be gone: the only way to shut them / you  up once and for all is to annihilate them.

There are plenty of factual and fictional examples of the desire to annihilate irritating people, but the one that springs particularly to mind considering the context of this campaign, is the case of The Silence: a religious order in the equally feared and loved TV series, Doctor Who.

The Silence had the uncanny knack of being heard through their catch phrase, “Silence Will Fall” in the 2010 series of Dr Who whilst stubbornly refusing to be seen until the 2011 series.   

This capability of being heard but not seen (inverting the usual Victorian maxim of children should be seen and not heard) was made more complex by their ability to keep their existence a secret through the simple device of ensuring that anyone who saw them immediately forgot about them after looking away, whilst retaining any suggestions that the Silence made to them.

They could therefore have a far-reaching influence across all aspects of human history without anyone really knowing what was going on.

We might ask ourselves today in the midst of all the global upheaval that is going on whether the Silence are in actual fact real and not a figment of some wild-eyed script writer’s imagination: but chances are, the moment you ask that question you’d probably forget who you were talking about and ‘silence would fall’.

The Mighty Creatives staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

In light of the Black Lives Matter movement that has caused great reflection on the societal injustice racism has impacted across the globe, this year’s Mighty Challenge focuses on supporting of The World Reimagined and their Community programme.

The World Reimagined is a ground-breaking, national art education project to transform how we understand the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and its impact on all of us.

The Mighty Challenge 2022 will support The World Reimagined’s Community programme, sponsoring local artists and young people to get involved in Leicester’s community Globe. This is 1 of 10 stunning globe sculptures in an art trail displayed across the streets of Leicester, highlighting the reality and impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

“If we’re going to make racial justice a reality for all, it calls on us to courageously face our shared history with honesty, empathy and grace. If we do that, we can create a future in which everyone can say “I’m seen. That’s the mission of The World Reimagined and were so delighted to work with the people and communities of Leicester.” (Michelle Gayle, co-founder of The World Reimagined.)

TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

You gotta decide the lighting,

It’s November, remember.

You gotta agree,

Sort it out reasonably.

You gotta think it out,

You’ve gotta act quick.

Silence hush descends.

 

You’ll need pools of light

You’ll need water, air, space.

Somewhere to park the car

When the days close in.

Can I get a red phone box?

Can I get an allotment?

Silence hush descends.

 

You’re gonna see nothing

With windows like that.

You’re gonna be a resident, remember.

You’re gonna freeze to death with walls like that.

Are we gonna pretend?

That we have to pay mortgages an’ ‘owt?

Silence hush descends.

 

You gotta make a choice,

Or you’re gonna get stuck.

Best to say little,

If you’re not sure.

If you don’t wanna pay for ‘owt can we live in a toilet?

We could use our imagination.

Silence hush descends.

 

Everyone’s gotta live somewhere

Everyone’s gotta have a place

They can call their own.

But if you’re gonna want a family.

But if you’re gonna get you a mortgage,

You gotta be quick, you gotta be sharp,

You gotta get rid of those ghosts that moved onto your land.

 

Silence hush descends.

 

Written in response to the challenges aired by young people from Year 7 Kingstone School, Barnsley on their future housing prospects.

 

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Story deconstruction techniques are great ways to counteract those who urge you to shut it.

Boje and Dennehy (1993) are particularly helpful when it comes to getting to grips with speaking out in a way you want to and constructing your own story, rather than repeat the stories of more dominant voices:

1. Duality search make a  list of any bipolar terms, any dichotomies that are used in the story,  Include the term even if only one side is mentioned. For example, in male centred and or male dominated organisation stories, men are central and women are marginal others.  One term mentioned implies its partner.

2. Reinterpret the hierarchy.  A story is one interpretation or hierarchy or an event from one point of view.  It usually has some form of hierarchical thinking in place.  Explore and reinterpret the hierarchy  (e.g. in duality terms how one dominates the other) so you can understand its grip.

3. rebel voices.  Deny the authority of the one voice.  Narrative centres marginalise or  exclude.  To maintain a centre takes enormous energy.  What voices are not being expressed in this story? Which voices are subordinate or hierarchical to other voices?

4. Other side of the story.  Stories always have two or more sides.  What is the other side of the story (*usually marginalised, underrepresented or even silent?)  reverse the story, by putting the bottom on top., the marginal in control, or the back stage up front.  For example, reverse the male centre, by holding  a spotlight on its excesses until it becomes  female centre in telling the other side; the point is not to replace one centre with another, but to show how each centre is in a constant state of change and disintegration.

5 Deny the plot.  Stories have plots, scripts, scenarios, recipes and morals.  Turn these around (move from romantic to tragic or comedic to ironic).

6. Find the exception.. stories contain rules, scripts, recipes and prescriptions.  State each exception in a  way that make its extreme or absurd.  Sometimes you have to break the rules to see the logic being scripted in the story.

7. Trace what is between the lines.  Trace what is not said.  Trace the writing on the wall.  Fill in the blanks.  Storytellers frequently use ‘you know that part of the story’.  Trace what you are filling in.  with what alternate way could you fill it in  (e.g. trace to the context, the back stage, the between, the intertext?)

8. Resituate.  the point of doing 1 to 7 is to find a new perspective, one that resituates the story beyond its dualisms, excluded voices of singular viewpoint.  The idea is to reauthor the story so that the hierarchy is resituated and new balance of views is attained.  Restory to remove the dualities and margins.  In a resituated story there are no more centres.  Restory to script new actions.

Go on – have a try and reconstruct the stories that are being imposed on you. You know you want to.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

You can’t go far these days without hearing about the importance of pupil voice in school improvement, consumer satisfaction or the climate emergency. The Brexit referendum was perhaps the biggest recent pretence at listening to the voices of the British people which taught us a lot about how voices are manipulated.

We at TMC place great store by our brand strapline, ‘Fighting for the creative voices of children and young people’.  It’s an aspiration at the heart of our mission statement and exemplified in the work we do..

Youth Voice is central to many youth engagement strategies: three inform our work at TMC including Hart’s Ladder of Participation, Treseder’s Degrees of Participation and Lundy’s Model of Child Participation.  In 2012, Karsten identified 36 different models of youth participation in which youth voice plays different degrees of importance: perhaps this tells us that trying to define youth voice as a singular entity is a lost cause from the outset.  

So, rather than define a phenomenon such as youth voice as one all-encompassing model, it might make more sense to see it as a polyphonal: multi-faceted, multi-structured and multi-purposed.

The Disney film, Toy Story 4 is a great demonstration of this.  

In an early scene Buzz Lightyear tries persuading our hero, Woody, to give up his quest to find Bo Peep and go home.  Woody refuses so Buzz asks his inner voice what he should do next.  But pressing his voice box buttons offers no solutions, and Buzz shrugs off the competing advice with Thanks a lot, inner voice. Something we all might recognise in times of trouble when it comes to listening to what we think our intuition, our gut feeling or what we might think of as our authentic voice is telling us.  

Scratch the surface a bit more and Toy Story 4 offers us some great insights into the phenomenon of ‘youth voice’.

For example, ventriloquation – when a speaker speaks through the voice of another for the purpose of social or interactional positioning.  This is demonstrated when Woody, on his quest to return the trash toy, Forky, to his owner Bonnie, chances upon a doll called Gabby Gabby in an antique store and her slavish ventriloquist’s dummies, the Bensons.

They are instrumental in her fight to regain her voice box.  Woody donates his voice box to her and this leads to her gaining the attention of a lost child at the end of the film which ensures both her and the child’s, happy ever afterness.  

The theft of voice is echoed in Disney’s Little Mermaid too, but Toy Story 4 also shows how voice is constructed through acts of impersonation.   In the final chase sequence, one of the toy gang, Trixie, impersonates the family car’s GPS system leading to the toys taking control of the car.  

Elsewhere in the film, the concept of heteroglossia (roughly translated as ‘multi-languagedness’) is also demonstrated.  Heteroglossia suggests that there are several distinct languages within any single language: with each of those different languages having a different voice which competes with the others for dominance.   So, for example, at a critical moment during his search for Woody, Buzz Lightyear, hears competing instructions from his own voice box:

“It’s an unchartered mission in unchartered space”

“No time to explain!”

“To infinity and beyond!” 

 But finally, Buzz presses the button with the inner voice phrase “The slingshot manoeuvre!” and this does the trick and Buzz is off to save the day again.  ‘Inner voice’ is far more heteroglossic than we might imagine. Listen to your inner voice says Buzz Lightyear throughout Toy Story.  But which one, we might ask ourselves?

And finally, whilst there are no apparent hypnotists in Toy Story, you don’t have to look far into Disney’s work to find Ka, the snake in Jungle Book who exemplifies perfectly how hypnotists can construct voices of impressionable young people.

So, is the search for authentic young people’s voices a false one, given the heteroglossic, provisional and fluid nature of voice?  And if so, then what hope is there for organisations like ourselves who place great value on the need to hear and act upon the voices of young people?

The hope lies in the very plurality that the word ’voices’ suggests. The work of Bacon and Korza is helpful here. They argue in Animating Democracy: the Artistic Imagination as a Force in Civic Dialogue, that it’s the very presence of the multiple voices which leads to civic dialogue and democracy.  They argue that the function of cultural organisations is not only as producer, presenter or exhibitor: but also as catalysts and forums for civic dialogue and for democracy.

This leads me to three final-ish questions.  If we could recognise our own multiple voices, might this lead to the democratisation of ourselves, and an acceptance of ourselves from which acceptance of others might follow?  

Could recognising the ventriloquists, thieves, impersonators and hypnotists in our own lives lead to greater tolerance of the multiplicity of the voices of others and lead to societies which are more at ease with themselves?  

And finally, when it comes to your time to hear the voices of young people, how do you perform?  Are you a ventriloquist,  impersonator, hypnotist or something else? 

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Over the last few years, I’ve been supporting The Mighty Creatives’ annual ‘Be Mighty, Be Creatives’ fundraising campaigns.  Whether this be through a Rock’n’Roll extravaganza In a Nottingham Church, a 24 hour Bring-Your-Own-Vinyl-A-thon in a Nottingham pub,  an exploration of Nottinghamshire by bike, or exploring the physical exertions required to net a basketball from a stationery position in the pouring Lincolnshire rain, the campaigns have been fun and firmly directed to supporting a mighty cause: fighting for the creative voices of children and young people in the East Midlands.

This year is no exception.  Called The Mighty (Un)Mute, we’re aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester, one of the most multicultural cities in the UK. 

Our Globe has been created by local young people and supporting artists, responding to the theme of Still We Rise. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. We’re going to put ourselves ‘on mute’ to turn up the volume of young people’s voices, especially those who identify as part of the Global Majority… those young people who so often go unheard. We won’t be communicating with anyone throughout the day verbally, electronically or in written form.

As well as participating in the day, I’ll also be contributing 26 blog posts on the topic of shutting up, silence and being silenced. There’s lot to consider and lots to discuss. So if you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here.

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and encourage me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

…but my eyes still see” sang Brian Poole and the Tremeloes back in 1967. It’s doubtful that they were alluding to resistance movements all over the world bearing witness to the crimes that empires commit in the name of national self-interest given the theme of the song is more about a lover’s betrayal, but the allure of silence fascinates many other musicians.  

Simona and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”, Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” and “Deafening Silence” by Machine Head would all be perfectly acceptable additions to a playlist which might be constructed before tomorrow, Monday 19 September.

Daniel Barenboim the conductor went several steps further:

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound…. There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle. This whole Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, the whole beginning of the prelude, is built on the use of silence as a means of expression. 

And that, as they say, is enough for today.

On the other hand, to add one final lyric from the McCartney stable:

Her Majesty’s s a pretty nice girl

But she doesn’t have a lot to say

Her Majesty’s s a pretty nice girl

But she changes from day to day

I wanna tell her that I love her a lot

But I gotta get a belly full of wine

Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl

Someday I’m gonna make her mine, oh yeah

Someday I’m gonna make her mine.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.

Resistance may be futile; silence may be the inevitable conclusion of assimilation but the human appetite for constructing meaning from any source and refusing to shut up never ends.

Closing Schools for the Future: “It’s just a loss of identity, that’s all…”

Whilst the logic of school closures is argued by Local Authorities as acts of logic, efficiency and rationality, school closure invariably generates stories of incensed parents, irate communities and exhausted teachers. What is frequently lost amongst the sturm und drang of closure however are the tiny stories (Denzin, 1991) of loss: of professional expertise, of collective memory, of shared hopes and fears, of voice.

Some years ago we asked the research question: what is lost from a school community once the programme of closure has been agreed and a school moves inexorably towards its final days? In counterpoint to the Building Schools for the Future programme that was rife at the time, the study begun as an ethnographic study of the closing months of a single primary school, Centenary Primary School on the Wirral which had just celebrated its 100th birthday: with its imminent closure was just months away. A school’s 100 years’ Jubilee celebrations and its death-closure over just a matter of months? You just couldn’t make it up.

Informed by earlier work conducted by Whitefield (1980) Molinero (1988), Schmidt (2007) and Picard (of 2003, not the Picard of Borgian assimilation fame), we used a multi-method research strategy, including an arts based educational research methodology using creative writing as a means of generating ‘tiny stories’ (Denzin, 1991).

Tiny Stories, Noisy Histories: pointing to the silences of intention, action and dialogue

Tiny stories is a technique used within the practice of creative writing workshops and it has many manifestations. 

Nanofiction or microfiction are writing exercises in which the length of a story is arbitrarily determined to perhaps absurd lengths: Stern’s micro-fiction model for example states that micro-stories should be no more than 250 words. 

The World’s Shortest Stories (Moss, 1998) is more stringent: stories should contain no more than 55 words (excluding the title which must be no more than 7 words long) and each story must contain the following four elements: 1) a setting, 2) one or more characters, 3) conflict, and 4) resolution.   

Snellings Clark (2008) offers another set of limits on length (100 words) and directs the writer not to use the same word twice.  She offers a set of aesthetic criteria which describe how the tiny story might most effectively function and how why they resist the instruction to be silent:

• Little stories that are larger on the inside than they appear on the outside.
• Stories that leave an aftertaste, that linger.
• Special nod to stories that include elements of the fantastic.
• Little things with big effects: lost keys, a scrap of paper, a chink in the armour, a missing screw.
• The inexplicable in the definable, the fantasy in the reality, the uncommon in the everyday, that something under the surface.

The secret little things: a microcosm of silence.

The Closing Schools for the Future project was written as a series of tiny stories which conformed to the Snellings Clark model: no more than 100 words in length, in commemoration of the age of the school at its closure.  78 tiny stories were written, each one representing a child who would have been on the school role had it not been shut down at the start of the next academic year.

Whilst this constitutes a small ethnographic project where n=1 and where the characters, narrative, dialogue and critical actions appeared to inhabit a microworld with microscopic movements, the ‘tiny stories’ told of cataclysmic change felt widely, resonating out across the landscape in which the school was based in ways not fully understood or predicted.

The soundscape of the territory was a microcosm of silence. Resistance to the closure had been purposeless, directionless if not completely futile. Questions remained unanswered, under investigated, under challenged: the assumption of logic, efficiency and incontestability was all pervasive.  

In this world of tiny stories, teachers identities were sometimes subtly, sometimes seismically challenged: John, a class teacher of some 15 years in the school had decided he just wanted to continue to teach in any school, despite being offered extra pay for taking on enhanced management duties.  But he just wanted to teach; and unable to play the job interview game refers in an observed class to the on-looking new head in a throwaway aside as an old witch which didn’t enamour him with her. So he failed to win the job in the new school and had to revisit his cv, his approach, his understanding of how he did what he did.  No longer a respected teacher for 15 years who had taught at the school classes across the range – he was now back in the marketplace with a label of as being a bit of a trouble-maker.

These tiny stories were not part of the building schools for the future mega-narrative of secondary schools; no bright new shining vision of educational pods for sophisticated young people who are able to opt for downloading content from their mobile phones over the attendance of a master class by an over-performing Uber-teacher who would be performing ballet steps one minute an entertaining the visiting private sector funders the next.

These stories had no shine, no brighter picture of a future but were stories of a quiet, seeping desperation which was prevented from turning into a collective madness by the efforts of teachers and children who continue from day to day as if nothing was about to happen. 

This was not an indignant narrative about the alleged lack of consultation of the authorities, an ironic parable about administrative dysfunction or a moralistic tale of performative brutalism – although each of those narrative genres emerged in the fabric of this story of school closure as it unravelled in its last few months.  It’s a collection of tiny stories of a tiny school told by tiny narrators.

The desire to silence

Behind these tiny stories, more complex narratives compete for attention and recognition as authoritative voices.  The bigger narratives pull at the microscopic texture of school and community and family relations, and the unravelling of that texture pulls on deep seated threads which pull elsewhere in our civil fabric: echoes and rumours of closure and melt down permeate the rest of the community.  

The loss of a name is mirrored close by with the demolition of a local church and the slow seepage away of local sights, knowledge and identity:  the local Centenary Vic Working Men’s Club had to announce it wasn’t closing in a letter to the press, perhaps indicative of  a microscopic flaking away of community of which the school is part of.  

These microscopic actions had macro effects which were unpredictable, chaotic, complex and still only partially understood: the desire to silence often leads to deafening and unknowable consequences.

More details of the research programme are here. If you’d like a copy of the research paper, please email me: nick@themightycreatives.com.

This blog is contributing to The Mighty (Un)Mute, a campaign aiming to raise £5,000 to support the artistic creation for one of ten Globe Sculptures in The World Reimagined art trail across Leicester. The purpose? To recognise and honour those most impacted by the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans through the centuries to the present day.

The TMC staff team are going to support the campaign by taking part in the Mighty (UN)Mute, a day-long vow of silence, on the 5th October. If you want to join us on the day and take a vow of silence, then please check out the campaign here. 

Of if the thought of donating your silence for 24 hours is really too much, then you can donate your hard-earned disposable income here.

Or if neither of these is possible (and heaven knows we’re all in tough financial times right now), then anything you can do to share and shout about the campaign would be equally welcome and appreciated.

So… come and help me to shut up, once and for all. You know you want to.