A quick chat with a stranger can be its own ray of sunshine
Hurrah! The sun is finally shining. The Beast from the East has been slain, as surely as if St George had parked up his white van and conquered the dragon with a bare chest and misspelled tattoos.
Suddenly, Victoria Beckham’s weird watermelon birthday cake makes complete sense. Those Bardot dresses banned from Ascot have undergone a rapid renaissance.
And the entire nation is outdoors: drinking negronis on rooftop bars, incinerating cheap sausages on disposable barbecues and having conspicuous fun al fresco in the park with 200 of their closest friends.
Except it’s not the entire nation, is it?
I don’t wish to put a dampener on spirits, not least because that’s forecast for Sunday. But for every gathering of Insta-genic millennials cracking open the coconut water in the sunshine, there’s another (and another) who’s home alone.
For every pensioner couple happily soaking up rays on a bench, there are many more unhappy old people, relegated to the role of wistful observers.
The young have coined the acronym FOMO. It stands for “fear of missing out”. It’s mildly self-deprecating, universally recognised and humorous enough to deflect any underlying emotion or anguish.
Twentysomethings experiencing FOMO talk and laugh about it openly because it’s temporary, right? Who hasn’t been too tired to go clubbing or too hungover to make that super awesome brunch by the river?
But there’s another, darker word for those feelings that nobody wants to say or, indeed, hear: loneliness.
It’s not just for Christmas. And it’s not just for the old.
Less than a fortnight ago, new figures from the Office for National Statistics revealed that 16- to 24-yearolds are more likely to feel lonely than their parents or grandparents.
A worrying 23 per cent of young adults said they were lonely some of the time, a figure that fell to 18per cent for the 25 to 34 age group, and to 17per cent among the over-75s.
And nearly 10per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds said they were often or always lonely, three times the figure for over-65s, which was 3per cent. How awful.
A virtual community is no substitute for a real social life, Snapchat friends a pale imitation of the real thing. What use is an invitation to join a Whatsapp group when you haven’t met up with anyone face-to-face for months?
You could say the two million or so young people whose lives are defined by loneliness are architects of their own misfortune. You could, but it would be unkind and judgmental.
By the age of 24, I had a job, a flat with a mortgage, a car and a dog. I also had a boyfriend and a circle of good mates – but my stomach still lurched, horribly, when I wasn’t asked along to a particular party.
What am I saying? It’s exactly the same now, when I have twice as many dogs, two children, a husband and barely enough energy to remove my eye make-up at bedtime, never mind rock up for a trendy bar opening in last season’s heel shape.
In truth, I have got to the stage where I love a cancellation. No matter how last-minute, it’s a relief to take off my gladrags and return to my chinoiserie peignoir and marabou mules.
But that’s entirely predicated on being invited in the first place. It’s part of the human condition for careless non-inclusion to be interpreted as “deliberate exclusion”.
Blame it on evolutionary biology or blame it on that awful new alpha mum on the school run blatantly cherrypicking her new pukka best friends, of which you don’t appear to be one, which is fine because you hate her. Really, it’s fine.
But for those young or old who feel their lives are empty of people, idle conversation, trusted companionship, the giddy birdsong blast of spring and the sultry prospect of long summer evenings don’t gladden the heart. For them, loneliness is a crowded park, a busy beer garden, the brigades of hipster dads shoving pushchairs and mums hauling picnic baskets.
But, in Telford at least, there is a green shoot of hope. The local Costa coffee shop has established a “chatty table”, where patrons are allowed, encouraged, expected to talk to one another.
What a lovely idea! So simple yet so powerful. There is, of course, the risk the table could be taken over by the sort of endlessly garrulous nutters who have little concept of personal space or, for that matter, personal questions.
The key in such situations is asking questions of the other person. Interesting chats, like interesting tennis, involve volleying and backhands and entertaining interaction, rather than a series of great big, boring-snoring self serves.
But the unfortunate corollary of too much time spent alone in front of a tablet or smartphone is the atrophying of conversational skills. The unfortunate corollary of atrophied conversational skills is that you get horribly self-conscious and resort to talking about yourself too much.
And people who talk too much about themselves are deemed boring and never get invited back. Thus the dismal sense of alienation perpetuates itself.
So what better way to re-acquaint oneself with the challenges and rewards of company than exchanging an opinion or a joke with a kindly disposed stranger in a coffee shop?
And if that stranger happens to be me, I promise to let you get a word in edgeways every now and then.
Go on. The sun is shining and you have nothing to lose – apart, that is, from your loneliness.