People have forgotten how to talk to strangers (if you live in the South)

For some, the art of engaging with people they don’t know has been lost. Christopher Howse and Guy Kelly consider what went wrong

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There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now…
It’s perfectly possible, these days, to make it through an entire week without having a conversation with a stranger. We work from home; we order everything online; we walk around with headphones on; we use the self-checkout. Uber even has a ‘quiet mode’ to give the driver advance warning that you don’t really care what time they clock off or how they feel about Kemi Badenoch, so won’t be asking, thanks.
Study after study tells us this is bad for society. Self-help authors urge us to strike up a chat with people like Christopher, if only for our mental health (and his). But on we go, building up a digital carapace, girding our little bubbles, treating his kind as blessed loons. London, a city of almost nine million people who only talk to one another via sensationally passive aggressive neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, is especially bad. Something really has to be done. But what?
They always say you should get a dog if you want to strike up conversations, yet that seems a mighty commitment for the sake of some idle chatter. Besides, dogs can’t talk. It would surely be better to get a parrot, or at the very least one of those goats that intermittently scream.
Other experts recommend sitting on a bench and waiting until somebody takes the space next to you, then remarking on the weather, or the flowers, or their lanyard. A shy colleague was sent to try this once. He waited all day but nobody sat down. The accompanying photograph had to be staged. Let’s call it artistic licence.
This is not a problem in the North, or the Celtic nations, or even the Midlands. I’ve been on vox-popping jobs in the Black Country and had to physically stop strangers talking to me, like a garrulous zombie attack, as I could only record them one at a time. “I’ll go after him, then,” one man in Dudley said, happy to queue. Once I was done with them, they continued to jabber among themselves.
Perhaps what we need down south is an exchange programme. Like jury service, we could be randomly selected to swap places with somebody from the regions for a week, to hone our prattle.
It’s an idea. I’ll ask around; canvass opinions. If anyone will talk to me.
When we heated the house with coal, as almost everybody did, a film of soot would sometimes flutter for some time on a bar of the grate in the updraft of the fire. This phenomenon was called a stranger and it was supposed to forebode the coming of an unknown visitor.
Naturally children were told not to speak to strangers or take sweets from them – they’d be poisoned or drugged for sure. Yet a stranger could be preferable to familiar dangers.
A shoe-mender near us when I was a boy carried on his trade in a creosoted hut in his garden, with rhubarb growing at one side. His nose was reddened but lean. His eyes were close-set.
He was so suspect that it was as much as my mother could do to take me with her to collect a reheeled pair of shoes ready in their paper bag among the odd-smelling rubber trimmings and cobbler’s wax. Any second he might bundle me into a sack, never to be seen alive again.
Everyone knew their neighbours in our street in Leatherhead. Most wives were housewives, in all day. But in London, we were sure, everyone was at war, every man against every man, in continual fear and danger of violent death.
None of this made for easy conversation with strangers, and it was a surprise on my gap year, spent not in Thailand or Guatemala but in Rusholme, Manchester, to find that folk there spoke to anyone, on the bus or in a queue at a shop. So it is, all round the world, except in suburban Surrey, and perhaps also Paris.
Fear of strangers now is bigger than ever, as proved by the school run. At least we were left in prams outside shops to be stolen by child-murderers, or not, and we ran to school unaccompanied.
My grey locks now license me to speak to adults, who are sometimes emboldened to categorise me as a dotard. “Ah, bless,” said the nice lady in Boots as I complained of rain on my bald head. Youngsters, though, keep shtum, resorting even among themselves to texts.
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