A Device to Measure Silence

6:59am.
Sat in the living room with a cup of tea, waiting for the water to heat up for a bath.
Still black outside, still seemingly deep night time, though I suppose these must be the last few minutes before the first smeary grey signs of daylight must appear. Everything actually feels silent here -silence not only an absence of sound- but something that has weight and presence, tangible and definable, able, perhaps, to be measured.
Winter.
Radiator-time.
(I remember Joe, crouched in his room at Worcester, winter of 1998, huddled by the radiator reading D.H.Lawrence for his lectures, a guilty gleeful look on his face that was never explained).
Dreaming in the black-out sleep of my room last night, but I don't remember what of. All I have are a few vague images of disquiet, and a feeling that in those dreams there was something important I had to do but that I couldn't remember.
Well, I'm sure the water must have heated up by now.
Time for a bath.
It seems unbelievable that in an hour I will be ten minutes or so into my walk to work.