About halfway round the park, by the last spindly remnants of the Festival of Britain, I bumped into my Scandinavian acquaintance.
‘Beautiful day,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be in Sweden by now.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite. My daughter’s going for midsummer – it’s her first time on her own. We’re going a little later but I thought she’d like a treat for having finished her GCSEs.’ ‘How gorgeous!’ I said. Around our feet our dogs greeted each other in a stately way – two schnauzers, hers a beautifully groomed gentleman called Prince with a gravity-defying moustache like a Wilhelmine Feldmarschall; mine a plump and rumpled small person, like the White Queen.
It’s an unusual morning when I haven’t talked to half a dozen people before ten o’clock
I am one of those people who strikes up conversations with anyone in the vicinity; also someone, for some reason, that people strike up conversations with. I never understand why people say that Londoners are unfriendly, or that nobody ever talks to anyone else. It’s an unusual morning when I haven’t talked to half a dozen people before ten o’clock.
It seems to be on the decline, however. The other day it was reported that a pub landlord in Bristol has introduced a policy that if customers ordered on an app from their tables rather than go to the bar and engage with a human being, he’d charge them 30p less per drink. There are a few businesses around, such as quite a popular coffee chain, Black Sheep, where you flail at a white-board-sized screen like an incompetent substitute teacher, try to find your desired coffee and bun, pay at the screen, and collect from the end of the counter without – the horror – actually having to speak to anyone.
I don’t get it. Why not stay at home and have your coffee sitting on the toilet, like Lindsay Lohan on her first day at school in Mean Girls, if the thought of human interaction in public fills you with such horror?
The old style of doing things in a café in Italy is much more the sort of thing. You go to the dignified lady in her booth with her till, who also sells tobacco, and ask after her children, bemoan the state of the world, tell her about what happened to your cousin on holiday in Montecatini Terme. Then you go to the bar, discuss some more stuff with Franco behind it. The other people having their morning coffee chime in; they may be friends, familiar faces, or strangers. Somebody’s nephew in Milan got burgled last week. The world is going to the dogs, every-one agrees. And off you go with your dose of human exchange.
Near the boating lake, we came across two other friends with their dogs, and we turned round to go to the charming café. ‘I’m off caffeine,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a herbal tea. I can’t stand that lemongrass and ginger, though. And the rooibos…’ My friends shuddered. ‘What would you have?’ I asked the girl at the till. We entered into discussion. Peppermint, was the conclusion; you couldn’t go wrong with peppermint which, unlike lemongrass and ginger, doesn’t taste like reheated bathwater.
It’s claimed by some businesses that customers like the self-service systems that involve minimal human interaction. I was always sceptical about this, assuming that it was really just to save money on staff costs and raise efficiency. I mean, I know the names of the children of some of the cashiers at my local Waitrose, so from their point of view, if I were taking my shopping through the self-service tills, that would be less yakking and less wasting of their valuable time.
But now I’m not so sure. A month or two back Simon Roberts, the Sainsbury’s boss, claimed that its customers love their self-service tills. A day later I went in on a Saturday afternoon. The queue for the self-service tills was gigantic, winding all the way back to the special-offer King Edwards. On the other hand, all was peaceful at the manned-till ends, with no more than one person waiting in the queue for each of the four tills. The risk of having to speak to someone was apparently worse than the certainty of 20 minutes’ wait before the solitary labour of scanning and packing began.
And yet hardly a week goes by without a survey disclosing that people under 30 feel lonely most of the time, and even that a substantial number of them consider they have no friends. How do they think friendship begins? Talking to strangers, of course.
On the bus on the way back from the park, I met my pal Michelle. She must live nearby – for some reason we only ever meet on the bus. She was keen to tell me it had just been her birthday and she’d treated herself and a friend to tea at Fortnum & Mason. ‘Did your brothers come?’ I said. Michelle pouted, pleased but knowing I was teasing. ‘Oh, you,’ she said. ‘They’re all doctors, you know, all three. They’d have been busy I expect. My dad was a doctor, it’s only me who didn’t become another…’ She trailed away somewhat. ‘I bet it was nice,’ I said. ‘Oh yes!’ Michelle said, and started to go into it in as much detail as she could remember.
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