Way back in 2006 I was coming towards the end of my 3rd and final year in University. Studying Film Production, as I did, we were all working on our final productions in the school. I was producing a movie called Expired, which I also wrote, while James was making a series of GAP commercials and the fabled Youd was on about 5 different movies. One of them about man-rape. Lovely. During the day I’d head up to the school, try to get a production office if one was free [or occupied by 2nd or 1st year students, which is the same as free because you can throw them out] and sort out budgets, locations and the like. Also we ate a lot of Subways in them days. Ho ho how young we were [meanwhile, in 2010, I have had 2 Subways this week alone, but can’t have one for a little while for reasons which will become clear once I’ve done all this backstory].

Having stopped working at about 4pm and grown tired of spinning in my chair and checking MySpace [MySpace! The internet’s abandoned fairground. That’s how long ago this was folks. I’m essentially one space forward in the queue in front of that hunched over guy with the club and the bits of dead bird on his face], and I called time on the day. Our building had implemented this silly ass ‘air-lock’ type system for getting in and out. You press one of those big green DOOR OPEN buttons from the inside and the double doors languidly stroll open. Step inside the cavernous ‘interim limbo’ corridor and wait for the doors to painfully jerk closed like an elderly man trying to get a chainsaw going. THEN, and only then, will you be allowed to press the second big green DOOR OPEN button, calling another, more decrepit set of double doors into action. If someone from outside pressed their button to get in, or a microbe get in the way of the interior doors, they swung open again and you had to start all over. It was a pain in the arse.

It was during just such a waiting period that my crew bumped into another crew, headed by a tall blonde girl called Polly. She was producing a movie that was to be shot using the in house studio, which needed painting and dusting and... wallpapering. I dunno. It was rubbish anyway and her production design department needed to spit shine it into usefulness. Work best done at night, with everyone else at home or out drinking Snakebite and Black [which a barman would pour for you in them days], and so as I was going home after a long day of spinning and trying to get the profile music on people’s MySpace to stop playing, she was just starting work. We exchanged some pleasantries. How’s your movie going, why on Earth would you use the studio, how come you’re just showing up now at 6 o’clock in the bloody afternoon you part time wastrel, and then the interior doors opened and she took her posse upstairs and away. We all had to wait for the fucking doors to shut again before we could go home, and our Snakebite was getting warm! Within 5 hours I was watching a movie with some 3 for £10 pizzas. Polly was dead.

SADS, or Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome, is largely symptomless and, as its name suggests, strikes out of nowhere in young and for the most part healthy people. There are a number of potential causes for the onset of SADS, none of which I can even pretend to understand, but in essence one minute you’re absolutely fine and the next. Gone. The next day was pretty uncertain for everyone. No one really knew what had happened as those who were with Polly had gone to hospital with the ambulance. Outside the school office sat the members of her crew who had come in that morning, their eyes swivelling to the door every time someone came out, just hoping for a shred of good news. Any news.

I didn’t know Polly very well, I’ll admit that now. She was a friend of a friend, a girl in my circle called Sarah, who she was living with, and we’d attended the same shindigs one or twice and obviously were doing the same specialism on the same course. Outside of work talk I think the only interaction with Polly I initiated myself was when I made her pose for a picture holding our “JORDAN IS WANK” sign. We had a friend called Jordan, he was wank, I made a sign. Carol Vodermann held it too once. Because she was a right girl about it all, Polly hid her face behind the sign. The photo I wound up coaxing out of her was the sign with her forehead and hair above it and her hands on the bottom two corners. I’ve still got the picture. Despite only having an ancillary association with Polly, her death caused quite a lot of ripples, which extended through into my life. Sarah eventually moved in with us for one, and losing her from the course created a vacuum for a lot of people for a long time. Her crew pressed on and completed her film, and Polly was awarded her degree posthumously on graduation day.

The effect the loss had on so many people I knew stuck with me, and still does years later, and when Sarah informed us all that there was a charity out there espousing the compulsory screening of those of us in the At Risk age group for SADS, it seemed like the least I could do was raise some money for them. I attempted, and succeeded, in a sponsored One Week Silence that same year, and in 2008 I went Vegan for 6 weeks in aid of C-R-Y [Cardiac Risk in the Young]. Remember when David Walliams swam the channel that time? It was C-R-Y who he did it for. [http://www.c-r-y.org.uk] The Vegan thing is easy to understand. That’d be hard for anyone without a degree in French poetry and a cheesecloth shirt. Still it’s important to explain just why buttoning it for 7 days is a challenge for me. I talk. Alot. Ok? There, I said it. I said a great many things, all day every day since I was able to. Most people would assume that I like the sound of my own voice, which I don’t, or that I’m some deranged attention vampire, which I only sort of am. A bit.

Truth be told it’s not that I like sound, I just don’t like silence. When I’m by myself or on the tube or something that’s all right, but it’s when I’m put in a compound or structure with other people that silence really starts to weigh on me. I can feel it, physically, when no one is speaking, and it’s not one of the nice feelings, like a sneeze or £380 worth of hand job. It’s bloody nightmarish. It claws at me like I’ve broken into its lair and tried to eat its young. I have to break the hold or be killed by it, so I talk. Doesn’t matter if I say two words and someone else jumps in and runs away with the conversation, as long as SOMEONE is talking I can rest easy. Muting myself means letting everyone else be quiet as well, and it’s this that I find challenging. That and I quite like the attention.

I actually got an e-mail from Polly’s Mum just after my Vegan Warrior deal, which was possibly the nicest thing I’ve ever been sent by anyone, and for 2009 I scoured my databrain for another thing to do for C-R-Y. I like sacrifice based challenges. No talking, not eating animals... they work for me. They’re prolonged and difficult and it makes me feel like I’m earning the money people sponsor me with. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of a fucking thing to do in ‘09 [briefly toyed with the idea of being “blind” for five days, but was eventually talked out of it] but last week one of the girls in work was going on about how she’s been sky diving earlier in the month, which is something a lot of people do for charity [despite most places still taking the full fee, out of your sponsorship funds, like a bunch of money hungry CHUD assholes] and it got me to thinking. Right now I’m in the last week of a secondment in the treasury department of Madame Tussaud’s. Ordinarily I work in the shop, selling crisps and foisting poorly made rubber magnets on foreign children. All of that involved talking to the disgusting public, but in the treasury no such torture. Another silence? Why not? Raises money, raises awareness of the charity and their aims. Just because I’ve done it before doesn’t make it any less useful. So shut up you naysaying bell-end!

And shut up I have. As of midnight this morning [yes that makes sense] I have stopped talking, and I won’t start again until the same time next week. ‘and what?’ you’re all thinking probably, if you’ve gotten this far and often find yourself thinking in complete sentences rather than abstract colours, ‘you already know you can clam up for a week. Where’s the challenge in doing it again?’ See, it’s shit like this that made me call you a bell-end just now. All right FINE! I’ll justify myself to you if it’ll make you feel fucking superior for a second! This time it’s gonna be more difficult. In 2006 we were basically done with Uni, barely had any reason to go in or even leave the flat. I only worked two nights that week, in a 24/7 self-service DVD rental place, and I had an assistant who I made do all the talky stuff. My mates ordered my food for me in the pub and in Subway. In fact my back and forths at this time were mostly with the same two people, one of whom barely spoke himself, so while personally I found it very tough to shut my face for any period of time, the obstacles I was presented with during The Silence ‘06 were nothing compared to what I’m expecting for The Silence ‘10. For a start I’m working all but one of the days. I don’t have to speak to customers, to my delight, but there are still staff here. They don’t need me to achieve their jobs or ambitions, I’m not a svengali or nothing, but they will talk to me. Or at me. The second I stuck up my posters letting people know what I was up to, and the cause for which I was up to it [http://www.c-r-y.org.uk], they barraged me with one, or both, of the following things;

1) Hyper-improbable situations they believe could befall me, forcing my throat to make sounds. How often do you see an old woman crossing the road and there’s a truck heading right for her and you’re the only person there? Never outside of very cheesy dreams. What if I see someone getting mugged?! I’ll do what everyone else in London would do. Keep walking and try to forget about.

2) Threats to make me speak.

This second one seems especially mean-spirited. If I fail to remain silent then I won’t get ANY of the money pledged to me. None of it. C-R-Y [http://www.c-r-y.org.uk] get nothing. Why would people go out of their way to deprive a perfectly good charity of much needed cash? What a shower of twats they must all be. And they are, but not without sacrifice of their own. My rule on this one is that they can mock, prod or cajole all they want, as long as they sponsor me. If they’re willing to throw down some ka-blingy for the cause then I don’t mind so much if they give me some jip. Make them feel like I earned it. However if anyone tries to hammer a word out of me WITHOUT dropping some sterling, they get a punch in the fucking neck. Richly deserved, as far as I’m concerned! Other problems I expect to encounter include lunch. In as much as I can’t order any. Like I said, before I had mates with me all the time, so if at any point we were in the pub or whatever and I wanted to eat, I could just tap one of them on the shoulder and point to my menu choice. Hey presto, 15 to 20 minutes later I’m eating a beef and ale pie. These days I’m much more solitary, so I suppose I’m reduced to making my own sandwiches and bringing them in, like a medieval pauper. Thank fuck for self service tills is all I can say [or not say]. There’s a party tonight, which I’m committed to attending, plus another one on Wednesday. Introduce booze into my situation and I might find it very hard to keep schtum. Of course there are rules, like any good... thing, and this is what they are:

1) No speaking, obviously, and no making noises with my vocal chords to communicate anything. So that’s no coughing or going “URGGH!” to get someone’s attention.
2) Laughing is ok, as is sneezing and proper coughing, but I’ve drawn the line at yelps of pain since they can be stifled quite easily. If you’re a real man they can anyway.
3) No writing things down on a little pad. If I’m gonna do that I might as well talk, really. To keep things modern I’ve folded Twitter, Facebook and texting into this rule. The only digital communication I’m allowing myself is one daily Tweet/Status Update to remind people of my plight and the address at which they can sponsor me [http://www.JustGiving.com/GazzShutsUp] and a reply text I devised which does basically the same thing.
4) To appease Nick I’ve had to agree to replying to work-based e-mails and texts, although I have made him agree to keep these to an absolute minimum.
5) When I was young I was known to talk in my sleep. Not just the odd murmur either. My parents have both claimed to have held full blown conversations with me while I was fast on. As far as I know these days I’m less loquacious when unconscious, but on the off chance I have a relapse or something I thought I should make a rule or it. Sleep talking is involuntary, and as far as I’m concerned, goes hand in snotty hand with sneezing/coughing/yawning etc...

ANYWAY... should probably crack on here.