Village Declared Officially Too Quiet, Baby Group Ordered To Keep Up The Good Work.

Haddenham has been placed on the second-highest tier of the national quietness register following an unannounced weekday inspection by the Chiltern Bureau of Ambient Volume, a four-person body operating out of a converted garage in an unspecified part of Buckinghamshire.

The Bureau's inspectors spent a Tuesday morning standing very still on the village green with their eyes closed. What they heard, according to their findings, was "a wood pigeon, one distant reversing beep, and a man sighing at his breakfast". This, the Bureau says, is not enough.

The Bureau's report singles out one location as the village's sole functioning source of what it calls "unstructured joyful volume": the Methodist Church on a Friday morning, where the Small World Baby Group meets from 10am and produces, in the inspectors' words, "a wall of sound no committee could replicate".

Mr Peckitt was keen to stress that the Group has done nothing wrong. "They are the last line," he said. "Everywhere else in Haddenham, a tea urn is the loudest object in the room. In that hall, on a Friday, there is shrieking, there is a xylophone being played incorrectly and with total conviction, and there is at least one adult singing a song about a spider with more commitment than the situation requires. We have recommended they continue exactly as they are, indefinitely, and we have recommended it in writing."

The Bureau's Volume Recovery Taskforce, formed on the drive home, has since floated a series of measures to bring the rest of the village up to standard. Proposals include a rota of people walking about jangling keys, a scheme to have the cricket club appeal louder for things that are plainly not out, and a plan to station a man near Norsk to announce the price of the brownie to passers-by, which the Taskforce concedes "would generate volume, but of the wrong emotional colour".

Asked how many decibels below the baseline Haddenham actually sits, Mr Peckitt said the figure was in the report. Asked which page, he said the report was currently with a colleague. Asked which colleague, he looked at the pond for a while and then said the important thing was that the trend was clear.

The Bureau's final recommendation is blunt. "Go and stand near the noise," said Mr Peckitt. "Take a baby if you have one. Take yourself if you have not. Sit down, drink the tea, let the volume wash over you. That is a functioning village. Everything else we do is paperwork."

So take the Bureau at its word, or at least take the Herald's. The Small World Baby Group is one of those quietly excellent things Haddenham does well: warm, welcoming, and gloriously loud in the best way, and it meets Friday 2 October, 10am, at Methodist Church. Babies, carers, grandparents and the merely curious are all in scope, and the village's ambient volume will thank you.