To employ that most trite of journalistic cliches (sorry, this blog doesn't allow accents), 'Picture the scene'.

Silent reading has been called, teeth have been cleaned and all other nocturnal visitations made and completed. The troops are on their beds and are reading happily and contentedly, while your correspondent is ambling in and out of the dorms, not saying a word, but feeling equally contented about having such a super lodge. The silence is a calm one, relaxed as everyone winds down at the end of a most agreeable day. If the silence were music it would be the second movement of Shostakovich's 2nd piano concerto, or that most beautiful of all Phil Collins' songs, 'Hold on my heart'; if poetry it would be Walter de la Mare's haunting poem 'Nod', yet it is all of these and none, for the moment is for ever what it is: soft, gentle, serene.

'Sir! What does 'pregnant' mean in this context?' shouts an enquirer, smashing the silence with a metaphorical sledgehammer. The word is put in its context and I am able to reply, without so much as a turning of a single silver hair, 'waiting for something to happen'.

'Thank you, sir'. The silence returns, but you can hear the other inmates thought processes whirring away.

As for the previous part of the evening, well, most were in the B.G. for the whole time, dressing-gowned and slippered while weilding table tennis bat. (That sentence has a vague allusion to the 1960s - when the juxtaposition of such words would have resulted in an altogether different meaning!)

Still, all is silent here once again, and it's time for me to sign off until tomorrow.

Goodnight.