Talking to strangers? Heaven forbid it catches on here
Normally I take the train to work. Not yesterday. I worked from home. Taking the train would have been much too risky. After all, a stranger might have tried to talk to me. It’s all the BBC’S fault. In its timehonoured, well-meaning, head-patting way, the BBC had organised and promoted something called “Crossing Divides On The Move Day”. The aim: to encourage users of public transport to strike up conversations with the person next to them.
Honestly. Has the BBC ever been more out of touch?
I mean, for pity’s sake. We’re British. We don’t want to talk to people we don’t know. And we especially don’t want to talk to them on our morning commute. To the British, a stranger is simply an enemy we haven’t made yet. And if that stranger is the sort of person who strikes up conversation on public transport, he or she is the most deadly enemy of all.
When we’re on the journey to work, we want to be left alone with our newspaper, or our phone, or our book, or our hangover. This is not a social occasion. That’s the real reason so many commuters these days wear headphones. It’s not an insatiable
passion for music. It’s to block out the sound of everyone else, and to make clear we are not to be disturbed.
Along with high school proms and Black Friday shopping, being friendly to other human beings is, I fear, yet another regrettable trend imported from America. Like millions of other decent, ordinary, bitterly unsociable Britons, I fervently hope it doesn’t catch on.
The judges of the National Restaurant Awards have published a list of the top 100 restaurants in Britain – and, unusually, almost half are from outside London (54 inside, 46 outside). This is a good sign. Restaurant criticism has always been far too London-centric.
When I was writing the Telegraph Magazine’s weekly restaurant column, my favourite places to eat were almost always outside the capital. Somehow, I found that, in general, London restaurants were less easy to relax in. Eventually, I worked out why. A lot of the time, new London restaurants felt as if they had been designed primarily not to please actual customers, but to show off to people like me – restaurant reviewers.
In other words: the sort of people who prize novelty over pleasure. Restaurant reviewers are obsessed with the new and experimental. Partly it’s because they like to be first to sample the latest trend. But mainly it’s because they’re bored. I suspect it’s the same in every field of criticism: films, music, books, anything. Say you’re a film reviewer. In your job, you watch absolutely every new film that comes out. That’s an awful lot of films. And so, sooner or later, you start to feel jaded. Oh no, not another comic-book superhero. Not another romcom. You’re desperate for a change of pace, and pathetically grateful when you get one.
As a result, there’s a risk you’ll end up underrating films that are good but conventional, and overrating films that are avant-garde, radical, difficult, “bold”.
This can cause bemusement in people who go to the cinema only a handful of times a year, and so aren’t sick to the back teeth with comic-book superheroes and romcoms. The ordinary viewer may well come out of the cinema thinking: “Well, that Richard Curtis film was much better than the critics said.” Or: “I couldn’t make head or tail of that Slovakian arthouse drama. I wonder why they all gave it five stars.”
And that’s the risk for restaurant reviewers. After too long in the job, you can end up exalting the emptily pretentious, and airily dismissing the popular and traditional.
Maybe restaurant reviewing should be like jury service. Everyone gets summoned to do it once, and then that’s that.
My five-year-old son has just reached a crucial milestone in any boy’s life. He’s found his first ever hero. But this hero isn’t a footballer, or a Youtuber, or indeed any other kind of grown-up. He’s something much more impressive than that.
He’s a Bigger Boy.
When you’re a little boy, there’s no one in the world you look up to more than Bigger Boys. My son has always held them in awe. I remember when he was three years old: whenever we took him to the park, he would latch on to any group of Bigger Boys, in the hope of being invited to join in. I can still picture them: these worldly, urbane young men of five, six, seven years old, trying to play at pirates together, while occasionally glancing down in puzzlement at the toddler trailing after them in silent admiration.
But now, finally, at the age of five, a long-cherished dream has come true. At the after-school club my son goes to, children of different year groups play together, and it’s here that he has actually managed to make friends with a Bigger Boy.
At all of eight years of age, Danny is a seasoned man of the world. And my son couldn’t be more excited that such a paragon deigns to speak to him. He positively glows with pride. These days, on the walk to and from school, Danny is almost all I hear about. “Dada, at after-school club Danny helped me make an aeroplane… Dada, Danny can play piano. He plays it so well…”
The other morning, my son asked me bashfully whether he could show me “a special picture”. He wouldn’t tell me what it was a picture of – until, on arriving at the playground, he stopped beside the school noticeboard, pointed shyly at a photo of a boy posing in the new school football kit, and whispered: “That’s Danny.”
My son, an only child, has often asked us to give him a big brother. How exactly we’re meant to go about that, I’m not yet sure, but until we can figure it out, I think Danny will make an excellent stand-in.