So the other morning, I’m lying in the bath. The temperature is spot-on. The
bubble quotient is more than satisfactory. My son’s favourite plastic shark
is floating around entertainingly and life, for a minute, is just about
perfect.
I sink below the water, humming the Jaws theme, only to emerge moments later
and find my wife sitting on the loo. She wants a conversation. I don’t. We
end up having a conversation about how we never have conversations any more.
By the time it’s over, the bath is cold. The shark has flipped over, its
floating carcass a grim metaphor for . . . something.
The very next afternoon, I’m having tea at Claridge’s with Catherine Blyth,
author of a terrifying new book called The Art of Conversation (John Murray,
£12.99), described as “a comprehensive guide of rules and tactics for
improving your social interaction”. Typically, she’s on my wife’s side.
Tired of a society of e-mailing, Facebooking, web-surfing, BlackBerrying
individualists, she wants us to relearn the joy of real interaction with
real people. “In short,” she claims, “conversation is second only to sex, a
lot less faff, and it really matters.”
The tea doesn’t start well. With all her book’s weird and wonderful rules
sloshing around in my head, I’m so busy trying to remember how to say hello
(that’s a whole chapter, right there) that I make a complete hash of the
revolving doors. Picking myself and a nice old lady up, I approach Blyth.
I manage a real smile (chapter 1, rule 5: fake ones, where the orbicularis
oculi muscles don’t contract, are easily detected). She smiles back.
I avoid the Dutch-style triple ear nibble and offer a firm (but not “like a
drowning man’s”) handshake, and it does the trick nicely. But then comes the
dreaded small-talk phase. As I apologise profusely – too profusely – for
being seven minutes late, and we’re interrupted not by a BlackBerry but by a
man wanting to know how strong I’d like my Assam, I become flustered. I’ve
forgotten chapter 3, rule 1 (“Great conversationalists listen more than
talk”) and the whole of chapter 4 (The Rest Is Silence).
She admits she is nervous, too, what with this being her first book. That
calms me down, but then I think she obviously isn’t nervous; she’s just
“disabling [my] shyness” (chapter 2, rule 2).
The sandwiches arrive. I grab one and neck a glass of champagne. Nerves are
contagious. We both speak at the same time. We both stop speaking at the
same time. Then, silence. She smiles again, but I’m not 100% sure the smile
is real. “Have you ever sat at a dinner, waited for someone to speak,
watched a glittering frost of smiles seal the silence, and wondered how
innocent cutlery can sound so very like the theme from Psycho?” asks Blyth
in her preface.
This is our Psycho moment, right in the middle of Claridge’s.
Although she has undoubtedly made herself harder to talk to by writing a
terribly smart and witty book about how to talk to people, much can be said
for her thesis. In our race forward into a technologically advanced world,
no one can dispute that face-to-face conversation is being shoved to the
sidelines. For thousands of years, it has been at the core of human
interaction. Now, much of it is virtual. I have a friend, for instance, who
thinks I’m a loser because I have only 53 Facebook friends. She has 545.
And then there are BlackBerrys. While I blow bubbles into my third cup of
Assam (it’s calming, like breathing into a paper bag), Blyth recalls a
dinner-party conversation she had with a banker. All the while, something
was buzzing away in his breast pocket. Eventually, he couldn’t resist having
a peek – and she asked him how many messages he’d received. Answer: 48. I,
too, have spent evenings watching friends watching the interbank lending
rate on their BlackBerrys.
We have found mutual ground! (Chapter 5, verse 1: “Good topics create talk.”)
I reward myself with a rather moreish mini mango yoghurt. Then we disagree
(chapter 5, verse 2: “Topics are unstable mixtures of attitude and
subject”). Blyth is so convinced the way to knit our fraying social fabric
back together is to talk that she even says hello to people in the street.
Sometimes that leads to an enlightening conversation.
Sometimes she gets nothing more than a shrug in return, which she hates.
I point out that unless it’s the Blitz or it’s snowing, you never talk to
strangers. This is the very cornerstone of English civilisation. And people who say hello to you are either mad, begging or ruthlessly determined to get
you to sign up with the Dogs Trust.
It’s not much better at a party. If you dare mingle beyond your circle of
friends, at best you survive. At worst you make a joke about Alzheimer’s to
someone whose mum has just died of Alzheimer’s. Blyth sticks to her guns:
“Conversation is like dancing – the more you practise, the more you get out
of it.”
I offer her a peppermint tea top-up and tell her about the time a beautiful
woman approached me at a posh ball and said: “Hi, Matt, having a nice
evening?” After years of forgetting names and pretending I hadn’t, I decided
to be brave. I opted intuitively for the approach endorsed in Blyth’s book:
honesty. “I couldn’t forget you, but I’m afraid I’m hopeless at names.”
“It’s Jessica. We had dinner on Wednesday,” she replied, before storming off.
Blyth says I did the right thing but I should have kept chatting. If I’d
chased after her, perhaps saying: “It’s because you have your hair up . . .
and you look wonderful in that dress . . . not that you didn’t on Wednesday
. . . you always look wonderful . . . I love you”, it would have been fine.
What about chatting up? One-liners are high risk, even Toby Young’s fabulous
“Are those space pants you’re wearing, because your arse is out of this
world?”. One should try what she calls “allo-grooming”. This apparently
involves tousling one’s hair or the like to attract attention. Then doing it
again. (Chapter 10, rule 5: “Activate their interest, look ready to be
interested.”) “Like a nutter?” I ask, tousling my hair. “All you’re doing is
breaking the ice. To start a conversation.”
And, cycling forward 10 years, how do I keep my marriage alive? Answer: I
actually have to talk to my wife. Blyth and her husband go for a walk on
most evenings to unravel the day. Sometimes he calls her Choglet. I don’t
think my wife would like that. She’d prefer the How to Row chapter.
Tea and conversation are over and I say goodbye (continental double and
possibly fake smiles). I get trapped in the goddamn revolving doors again.
It must be the doors, not me. On the train home, I decide to give Blyth’s
admirable hypothesis a go. Standing across the carriage from me is a
stranger. I allo-groom my way into her eyeline, then do it again and smile.
But the stranger is quite young, wearing a short skirt with knee-high socks;
kind of early Britney. She clearly thinks I’m a pervert and scowls.
So I ask the bloke next to me if his iPhone is the new model. He can’t hear me
because his bloody music’s on too loud. Taking his earphones off, irritably,
he says: “What, mate?” I’m about to repeat my pointless question when the
iPhone in question starts to ring (a rap sequence).
I get off the train, resolving not to lend my copy of Blyth’s bible to my
wife. It’s not that good to talk.
I think this article was wonderfully marvelous. It was witty, and captivating. I also believe that the art of conversation is dead and gone, and unfortunatley we are in an age of technology where we need a constant soundtrack, and constant communication with people who are just a click away.
Jennifer , Toronto, Canada
Great article, I agree conversation does seem to be dying out. You can learn so much from other peoples experiences and there's nothing like getting it directly from the horses mouth. 'The colour of life comes from the people you meet and the stories they tell, the rest is mundane'.
David , Brighton, UK