I was at a seminar recently where we were divided up into the usual predictable groups at which I confessed to my group I found what most people had to talk about stultifyingly boring or trivial. They were shocked. Many of them took it personally. But I am in agreement with the Romantic poets , when Thomas Carlyle said:
‘Under all speech…lies a silence which is better. Silence is as deep as Eternity; speech is as shallow as time.’
Although I do appreciate silence is often neither golden nor perfect. I have some empathy with George Elliot’s caustic observation:
’Speech is often barren, but silence does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cracking will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.’
So perhaps I should be precise and say by all means say something but could you try and make it wise or interesting or compassionate or arresting or hilarious or sardonic or something——anything other than trivial or boring or (oh horrors!) my least favourite ‘me,me, me and another fascinating thing about me.’
I worked in Stoke on Trent for nearly 20 years. Not, admittedly, the centre of the universe, but full of people who talked to me about about interesting things. Things I’d never heard of or would never do myself but which I found fascinating, bizarre, educational or entertaining like raising racing pigeons, growing giant vegetables, mastering a language of northern phrases I’d never heard of (being a good well educated colonial girl) or the trails of the pottery painting industry or why so many horses die in a full eclipse or recipes for Staffordshire oatcakes or why Arnold Bennet refused to speak about the 6th town, or half a dozen ways to make figgy pudding, or the Korean War. I could go on but I won’t. It might get boring….
