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  • Writer's pictureMartyn Offord

May 22nd Covid Conversations

“. .....he may have had to a preternatural degree that quality of mind, not unknown among modern scholars, that causes a man to believe that whatever he thinks, says or does is infallibly true and right, and that whatever he observes in the world is true and right only insofar as it coincides with what is already in his mind.” I saw someone described this way this morning and we all know people like this. Some may claim they live with people like this; Deirdre claims to know someone like this. We may know people that leave you drained after a conversation or who leave you reeling because their conversation seems to be hard punch upon punch buffeting you against the ropes. We had a phone call this morning from someone who, after announcing who she was, was silent and seemed to expect us to guess what she was ringing about. From some people – too much talk, from others – too little. Sometimes people need to talk and we need to listen, sometimes it’s vice versa but we all recognise a good conversation as a 50/50, a bit like a game of tennis: How was your day? Fine, how was your day?


I am sure lockdown has affected the art, (or is it a skill?) of conversation. One advantage of lockdown is we have been able to be more selective about who we talk to because we’re not trapped into social circumstances where we have to endure the bore, the pedant, the misery-guts and the egoist. I believe conversation is a skill that can be learned as well as an art at which some people are consummate performers. Most of us have slowly and painfully learned the skill of accommodating the bore, the pedant, the misery-guts and the egoist. Perhaps when we’re thrust back into the conversational arena we will have lost that skill and will be rudely honest, confrontational and impatient. That might even be a good thing. At Present our conversational opportunities are limited, so we value them more and want to make the most of them. Apart from family members, they are constrained by physical circumstances: 2 metres apart (which confuses some old people who seem to think that equals two feet, especially when they don’t have their hearing-aids in), over a garden wall or on the phone or one of the video platforms.

I have five forums.

1) At home it is: (A) Have you seen my phone? (B) No. Where were you when you last used it? (A) Yes. (B) Have you looked in....(unfinished) (A) errrm.. This ‘restricted register’ is typical of family talk because everyone can predict what the other is going to say. So when A starts, “Have you seen...?” B knows the object of the sentence will be either phone, iPad, keys or sunglasses. It might be “my glass of wine”, though that rarely gets mislaid.


2) Over a wall is often related to the fact that my beans survived last week’s frost and has the unfortunate consequence of misleading people into thinking I know what I’m doing in the garden. They begin to expound learnedly upon horticulture and I nod with an air of knowingness. But there’s also over other people’s walls and we are discovering many interesting opinions, experiences and histories from some unlikely people, because current circumstances are prompting conversations we never had before.


3) All the kind people who deliver to our door, ringing the bell and then leaping back as if it has emitted an electric shock. Here is kindness personified as they bat away our apologies, justifications and gratitude.


4) Via technology, sometimes phone but more likely Zoom or something similar. We are becoming quite adept at this sort of conversation once the protocols of turn taking have been mastered. The bore, the pedant, the misery-guts and the egoist can be muted and you can either nod strategically or cultivate an expression of terminal boredom. But usually you wouldn’t be wasting good conversation time on them anyway. On-line time is special time. It has been planned and prepared and we find we’ve entered into some really growth times with distant friends, especially those living abroad whom we haven’t seen for years. An American friend remarked the other day that we could have been communicating like this years ago but it has taken the pandemic to mobilise us. Another feature of seeing your interlocutor on screen is that the frame contains them. This is especially useful when doing home schooling with grandchildren who, in real life are usually under the table or swinging from the curtains when you’re trying to have a conversation. The screen cages them.


5) I’ve forgotten the Fifth.


One of the main deprivations I noted after retirement was the cut and thrust of staffroom conversation. This was stimulating discussion and arguing, witty abuse and joking with professional equals across the age range who brought a diversity of specialist knowledge to the chat. Politically it was to the left of centre, it was well informed and politically correct without being silly. Also, there was a lot of moaning, but it was high quality moaning. We all knew each other well and we all found each other interesting.


In the Seventeenth Century there was a blossoming of the coffee shops where certain famous and brilliant men held sway, like Dr Johnson or John Dryden. Gentlemen attended regularly just to hear their conversation, though there was a modicum of my opening quotation about them. Famous scientists formed the Royal Society to converse about scientific matters. Later there were the gentlemen’s clubs. You may be wondering where the women were. They were serving the coffee. But the society hostesses, like our own local Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire held their soirees in which it was a privilege to be seen and to capture a bright star of the intellectual ferment like Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde was quite a coup. I have the Peak Boys’ Breakfast Club, to whom I will introduce you next week (unless I have already done so, I must check), gatherings in the pub, and for many years a men’s group. Some have book clubs or church groups. Like our loquacious ancestors of the Sevwenteenth Century we create forums for our sort of conversation with our sorts of people and it is these we are missing seriously and making huge efforts to replicate through social media.


I’ve remembered my fifth forum – my interior monologues. These are of a very high calibre and don’t risk contradiction. They are often the summation of years of reading, listening and thinking. All this accumulated knowledge and nowhere to diffuse it, no audience – apart from the guileless young mother who stopped to chat at the gate and hearing her little boy using an irregular past participle (eg I thinked) gave me the licence I was waiting for to expound upon Naom Chomsky’s theory of deep grammatical structures. Since then the guileless young mother seems to have found an alternative, though much longer, route for getting home.


Blogging, of course, is not conversation because it is one-way, though I'm always grateful for the comments. Nevertheless, I love a quote from Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behaviour’. “I never learned anything from listening to myself.” (!!!)

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