Cuddington Cinema Night Declared Louder Than The Moon

At twenty past seven on Tuesday evening, in the car park of Bernard Hall in Cuddington, a retired sound engineer pointed a borrowed decibel meter at a closed fire door and announced that the Village Picture House had become the loudest object currently visible from the village, including the moon.

The moon, he conceded, is further away. This was treated as a technicality.

Word moved through Cuddington the way it always does, which is to say badly and with improvements added at each house. By Wednesday morning it was established fact at the bus stop that the hall's speakers had been salvaged from a decommissioned ferry, that the screen was being adjusted by a man in a harness, and that the opening ten minutes of whatever is showing would be audible in Haddenham if you stood still and faced west.

"I heard the trailers through my pillow and I live past the church," said a woman who later admitted the sound had been her boiler. She did not retract the claim. She simply stood by the gate holding a cup of tea, listening hard, with the expression of someone waiting to be proved right by the universe.

A gentleman known locally for having a figure for everything arrived at the hall on Wednesday afternoon to settle the matter properly, said he had done the reading on what a room that size can physically do to a human ear, said he had it somewhere, and then spent forty happy minutes explaining the difference between a projector lamp and a projector bulb to a man who had asked for neither. Everybody left better informed and no louder.

What all of this has actually done is sell the place out to itself, which is the nicest thing a rumour has managed around here in years. Go. Sit in the dark with your neighbours, let the hall be as loud as it likes, and find out whether the moon has anything to worry about: the Village Picture House runs on Thursday 8 October, 8pm, at Bernard Hall Cuddington, and we would quite like to see a full room.