Small Talk

‘Try harder,’ he says.

‘I have tried. I can’t!’  And what is more, sometimes I’m not sure that I want to.

My husband and I have had this argument several times over the last few years.   The problem is this: I don’t do small-talk.   I actually don’t know how to.

Here is the scenario.    Friends of my husband visit.  When the children and grandchildren have been discussed and we have exchanged any other news I fall silent.  I actively dislike football.  I don’t watch all that much television.   Strictly? Never watched.   Eastenders?  Yawn.  Great British Bake-off – what?   So I sit and listen, a rictus smile on my face.   Usually, I start knitting a pair of socks. 

I can’t do it.   Honestly.   I am sure some people think I am off-hand and a snob but it is mainly social awkwardness, not snobbery that makes me keep my trap shut.   My idea of purgatory is a reception, where I have to stand with a glass in my hand making polite conversation with people I have never met and will never meet again.

In Ethiopia people will recite their family connections when they meet a stranger.   More often than not they will find a common ancestor, or a third cousin three times removed being married to a distant relative.   At least it gives you something to talk about when you meet someone.   It is the finding of common ground that makes small-talk so important to human interaction. 

My sister-in-law is a master in this art.   With a light touch, she will go back thirty years to discover she has taught an auntie, or that her mother taught a former ex-husband’s sister of the person she is talking to.   She can always, always find common ground.  With anybody.   It is exhausting to watch.

 Oh, I can talk.   About politics, philosophy, current affairs, art and literature.   It is just that there is not much call for such conversation topics in passing.

In the shop I have to try even harder.   When buying buttons or ribbons, people demand their pound of flesh for their pennies; they want attention.   I have to listen and make appreciative noises when a customer explains that the knitted cardigan is for the third baby of the daughter of a good friend.   The half metre of ribbon for a button hole is for the wedding reception of someone or someone and I feel obliged to smile and admire someone’s latest cross-stitched bookmark of a Highland Cow. 

Thank God for the weather.

In good Scottish tradition, the weather is the one topic where I can find at least some common ground with a customer, or a passing stranger, or the busdriver.   You can always have a blether about the weather.  Oscar Wilde said that conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.  I agree, but for me it is a lifeline to normality. 

‘t Is dreich,’

‘It’s Baltic,’

‘I forgot ma brollie and now I’m drookit,’

‘The haar’s in where I stay, yae cannae see your hand for your face,’

‘That’s no rain, it is smirr,’

‘it’s awfy mochie,’

And I say ‘yes,’ it’s cold, or wet, or uncomfortable and clammy.  Sometimes I even manage a few sentences.

‘Where I stay, the snowdrops are out, can you believe it?’

‘Don’t worry about dripping on the floor.  I’ll mop later.’

‘We had nearly ten inches of snow where I stay.’  I think in metric but am careful to translate this to imperial for certain customers.   Inches add impact.

I know that there are folk who don’t get to talk to anyone for days on end.   People who go to a shop just to have a snippet of human conversation, even if it is only about the weather. I know that the absence of human contact adds to depression and lowers life expectancy.   That is why I often feel disturbed by my delight in having a full day in which I don’t have to engage in such conversations, or any conversation at all.   Sometimes I think there may be something wrong with me in wanting to avoid small talk.

I do my best.   I smile and make approving noises, I commiserate with weather-related complaints, I listen to tales of snowfall or floods of biblical proportions and I rejoice when the sun creeps out.   The weather in Scotland never fails to deliver: if you don’t like it, just wait for half an hour and it will have changed.  According to recent research, 94% of Brits will admit to having spoken about the weather in the last six hours.  If that is the price of being human, I'll pay.

It is only a matter of time before they invent ‘The Great British Weather Show’ for television.   And believe me, I’ll watch it.   That way, I’ll never run out of small talk again.