The first portion of this post was published on LinkedIn on 28 April 2023. The second portion (Lost in Leefdaal) was originally published in LinkedIn on 29 April 2022.
What do you want to talk about?
It says on LinkedIn “What do you want to talk about?” I want to talk about talking.
“No talking in class,” they used to say to me at school. What class would that be? The proletariat? The bourgeoisie? The upper-middle class? The ruling class? No matter which class you belong to, there is less and less talking in class. And, contrary to schooldays, there is as good as no talking between classes.
The Internet, a vector for communication, is now where we talk. Some of it is vitriolic, some of it overweening, and some of it falsely seductive. Most of it is written, like this. That which is spoken is one-way.
The home is less a place for talking than in my youth, when a single TV set and a stereo were all that separated parents from pop-music-loving kids. (But not when The Two Ronnies were on.) Now, kids have their own TVs, computers, ear buds and iPhones. They talk in abbreviations to their peers, and seldom to the peers, the lords and ladies, of their manor.
What of the street? Sunday’s Observer is set to analyse what happens on our streets:
“Why have we stopped talking to strangers? Efficient urban design, attention-grabbing screens and isolating headphones all mean we’re rapidly losing the art and joy of spontaneous encounters. But the artist Andy Field has a plan for how we can start to connect again ...”
I, for one, shall be reading it. And perhaps be talking about it.
I joked this week with my lodger. He’d driven last weekend with me to a friend’s in a nearby village, and took the longest of the three routes I know to the friend’s house. He was following the GPS. The distance is about 6 km. I told him that I have local knowledge and that I know a straight road that would take us to her door with only a single right-hand turn. I just checked that on the map app and, to my surprise, it also offers three routes, none of which is mine, which, ironically would take you along Kwikstraat. He replied that the GPS goes the fastest way, which isn’t Kwikstraat. I asked him what he had planned doing with the 1 minute we thereby saved. Today, I said he probably needs the GPS to drive to the end of the driveway. To make sure it’s the fastest route.
I never use GPS. Always maps. I occasionally look up an address on the computer and then commit the route to memory. My memory is fading, so, I get lost. I discover places I never knew. And I ask the way. Most, if not all, the people I ask seem delighted to be able to help a traveller in need (admittedly, I drive a very old car of which there are few, so it helps draw curious attention).
I ask women walking a dog. Or petrol station attendants. Or policemen. Or 16-year-old lads on their way home from the doctor’s. Anyone. And I always have a nice experience, even if it’s for a few seconds. Cheery greetings and fond farewells — with perfect strangers. Who I call on for assistance, and who lend it, gladly.
Remember class, and the privilege of talking.
Lost in Leefdaal
Image: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/04/29/ongevallen-elektrische-step
Joachim will be around 16, I guess, has shoulder-length hair, wears the loose baggies of a “sagger” and lives in Leefdaal, a rural outreach of Louvain and a place I don’t know very well. It lacks signposts to guide the lost traveller on his way and, last Wednesday, I was lost in Leefdaal. Many of you will have ne’er heard of Leefdaal and, you’ll be comforted, parts of Leefdaal have ne’er heard of you. “Parts?” I hear you ask. “Many parts?” Suffice to say, enough of them to confuse this lost traveller on his bike last Wednesday and present the quandary: to the left, or to the right?
Passers-by are not in surfeit in this particular part of Leefdaal, so when seeking one to guide you along the right path, you have to take whatever the good Lord sends. And to me He sent Joachim, riding down the road on his electric step-scooter. On his way back from the doctor’s. He’s had a bit of a cough but, he assured me, it’s nothing catching. He enquired of my plight, which I conveyed as being that I would know the road to Meerbeek, or perchance to Everberg, where, they say, there do live wild swine.
Joachim was born into a time when all cars have satnav and every hand under 25 holds a smartphone. He has lived some of his formative years at a time in which he feels a bounden duty to inform strangers such as me of the danger of contagion that he presents. I was born into a time when geography lessons comprised learning Ordnance Survey map symbols. And my own father, an RAF pilot, could fly a bomber by the stars in the heavens. I wonder if one day Joachim will loll back in his armchair, puff on his pipe and marvel at the things they do in that far-off day that he didn’t do when he was 16. But, at 16, he is where it’s at, with his baggies and his step-scooter — which will launch him into unlicensed thrills of 25 kph and, if he’s not too careful, into oblivion.
He turned his conveyance around and announced of a sudden that he would do naught less than accompany me the way till I was back in familiar territory; and, with that, we were off, he and I abreast at a modest 18 kph (to save my tired old biker’s legs). He presently stopped and indicated to me the hill that would return me to where I needed to be. We bade each other farewell, and I assured him that, the next time I was lost, I hoped it would be in Leefdaal; and said that he was to take care of that cough. Sure enough, come atop the hill, I looked out at what was still un-signposted, but nevertheless distinctly Familiar Territory.
Joachim is the latest in a long line of passers-by accosted by me in my human erring, whom I have bid to set me on the right path. They include a young chap with a dog called Charlie (the dog; I dunno what the chap was called) and his girlfriend (the chap’s, not the dog’s) in Beersel, a petrol station attendant in Solingen, a one-armed van driver in Ghent, a purveyor of cakes in Touffailles (in rural France, so well justified), a lady emerging from a bakery in Waremme (who, when I asked, bore a look, because she knew where it was I needed to go, of someone who’d just won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?), and no end of others. People like to be helpful, and, though the interaction be but of short duration, I rarely continue on my way without a gladdened heart and something positive from the personal experience.
The gadgets that facilitate life make us more humanly independent; and yet it is ultimately our dependence on the other that makes us that bit more human.