Silence not fatal to women: Official
Ground-breaking research liberates females worldwide
by Germaine O'Greerson
Millions of women around the globe are today breathing a collective — and hushed — sigh of relief this week after a research team proved that even extended periods of silence were not fatal to female humans.

The ground-breaking investigation debunked hundreds of years of popular myth which maintained that even a few seconds without some form of conversation could kill an adult woman dead on the spot. Lead researcher Dr Antonia Vileda-Shine told The Rockall Times: "The results surprised me as much as anyone, I can tell you. We put a husband and wife into a controlled environment with sofa, television set and remote control, and asked the wife not to speak for approximately twenty seconds while her partner was watching Euro 2004. To our amazement, she did not expire at the end of the enforced silence."

The news has been greeted with jubilant scenes as hitherto verbose women realised that they would no longer have to shoulder the burden of expanding a minimum of verbal material to fill anything up to 90 minutes. "It was just exhausting," admitted one visibly-shattered Kent housewife. "To sustain a one-sided conversation about what happened at the supermarket checkout for the entire duration of a football match is exhausting. But that's what my mother did, and my mother's mother, and I always assumed that if they stopped twittering on then the silence would kill them."

But while women can now look forward to a more relaxed and decibel-free home environment, many men have reacted to the news with dismay. "I tried to read the paper yesterday without the usual accompaniment of the missus giving me the weekly rundown of who said to who down at the hairdressers," admitted a man propping up the bar of his local. "I just couldn't concentrate, to be honest."

The triumphant team behind the discovery this morning confirmed that they are moving on to a new area of research, and intend to prove that women will not go blind if they read the instructions which are supplied with washing machines, microwave ovens, DVD players, etc.