Overheard Today

Overheard today a woman discussing her preference for one shopping centre over another.

Felt strongly about neither. Ultimately it came down to travel distance and concerns about some phantom person having monopoly on nail salons.

A lot of was made of these small differences that, by the speaker’s own admission, have little impact.

And yet the amount of words spoken on this topic . . .

I was a good student. Shortcomings were for wanting to argue the point rather than focus on the task at hand.

Because a conversation is a like a story, isn’t it? It’s give and take. It’s ideas swinging from side to side, and where the pendulum stops actually matters.

Small talk is about the gesture. I don’t really want to talk to the shopkeeper about the weather, but my doing so is a way of saying ‘I am friendly’.

If you engage in that much small talk that you can have whole conversations of empty utterances, which, when interrogated, mean next to nothing, you’ve forgotten what being a social animal is all about.

Too much small talk and you’ll wake up one morning with actually nothing to say.

This has been the forty-sixth publication of Dressing Gown, a daily blog from Ted Janet