Not even Radio 4 could get to the nub of loneliness
In early 2008, as I stood on the doorstep with a new baby in my arms, watching my husband stride briskly off to work, I felt the first twinges of “suburban neurosis”. This is an actual medical term, coined by doctors between the wars. It was used to describe “a tired, fatigued, listless woman… failing to cope with the demands of running the home”. But the real problem – as we discovered in Radio 4’s The Anatomy of Loneliness – was a simple lack of company.
Living in the newly built suburbs, where even the neighbours seemed far away, was lonely. More fundamentally, so was staying at home all day with only a baby to talk to. It still is: the only difference is, we no longer dismiss the isolation of the stay-at-home mother as mere neurosis.
On the contrary, loneliness is now taken very seriously indeed. The Tories have appointed a dedicated Minister for Loneliness (one assumes she is actually against it, despite the sloppy grammar). The Office of National Statistics has been charged with measuring our loneliness levels. And the BBC, together with the Wellcome Collection, recently undertook the Loneliness Experiment: the largest survey of its kind in the world, with more than 55,000 participants. The Anatomy of Loneliness is an attempt to make sense of its findings.
Episode one, last week, was rather dry – largely taken up with boasting about the size of the study and presenting its results. Episode two, on Tuesday, took a closer look at the mechanics of friendship. Presenter Claudia Hammond opened with an unpromising stream of platitudes (“Good friends see us through the hard times and celebrate the good times”), but later redeemed herself with some illuminating case studies.
Megan Paul, a blind blogger, told Hammond how her disability made it hard to perform the body language of friendliness: she couldn’t always tell whether someone had come into the room, let alone make eye contact with them. For Paul, the internet has been a godsend: she now has a network of blind friends all over the country. But social media can also exacerbate loneliness. Scrolling through images of other people’s seemingly perfect lives is bad for morale; yet telling the truth about your own life may be even worse. The data shows that people who say negative things about themselves on Facebook are lonelier than average, because people don’t want to connect with them.
Humans are wary of neediness. Only a philosopher, or perhaps a novelist, could do justice to this sad truth. It lies behind so much of the unforced loneliness – nothing to do with geography, age or occupation – that statistics can’t explain. Hammond and her researchers did their best to dissect the findings of their survey, but it needed more delicate fingers to tease out the nub of the problem.
One antidote to loneliness, of course, is kindness. This is a quality that composer Hubert Parry appears to have had in spades – and which helped bring about the early 20th-century flowering of talent known as the English musical renaissance. Parry is today best – indeed, only – known for the coronation anthem I Was Glad and the hymn Jerusalem. But in A Portrait of
Parry, Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, Simon Heffer attempted to restore the composer to his rightful place, as “a central figure in the history of British music whose example and influence changed, for the better, the culture of an entire nation”. That’s a jolly big plinth to fill, and Heffer didn’t quite succeed. But it was a pleasure to listen to the evidence.
Parry was born to a landowning family, at a time when Britain was known as “the land without music”. His family, said Heffer, would have preferred to keep it that way: they were aghast when young Parry’s tootling on the church organ turned into a serious vocation. “A gentleman could not really be a composer.”
But this gentleman was determined. Parry’s grand choral and orchestral works in the German tradition proved hugely successful, and he was made director of the new Royal College of Music. As a teacher, said Heffer, Parry “seemed to breed great composers” – among them, Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney and Gustav Holst.
Parry’s generosity to his pupils was legendary. He secretly paid the tuition fees for one of his first female students, Rebecca Clark, when her father refused. When Herbert Howells developed Grave’s Disease, Parry paid for experimental radium treatment. It saved his life, and thus gave the world Howell’s glorious religious music. In the end, the achievements of Parry’s pupils eclipsed his own. But one got the feeling he wouldn’t have minded at all.