I slightly regretted this one but it did show me a different argument.Ī cab driver told me that his three siblings and parents were killed in the Bosnian war, and he can’t stop reliving it every time he hears about Ukraine. “I hate Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, they’re fascist, don’t you think?” a woman told me in the newsagent. I ended up talking to a homeless person for 25 minutes outside a Costa and was late for work. Instead of immediately looking down at my phone in cafe queues, I started chatting more to baristas. “A lot of us find it difficult to step out of our comfort zone and say hello, but through those encounters that might shake our beliefs or habits, we learn to imagine how things could be different, or how we might interact better, or what we might want to change within our society.” “The way so many of us live in bubbles, whether on social media, or algorithms that show us exactly what we like, I worry we are getting too familiar with our own worlds,” she says. Professor Sylvie Delacroix, Professor of Law and Ethics at Birmingham University, is a big believer in the value of this.
And every time I did manage a conversation, however fleeting, I felt a buzz. Fair play.Īs the days went on, I still hated it but it began to feel more normal. She looked up, gave me a tight smile and went back to her paper. The next morning, buoyed by my Docklands experience, I tried speaking to a young woman. “I wish you a long and happy life,” he told me. He told me about another recent signal failure then suddenly talked about his wife who was in hospital with heart trouble, that they’d been married 62 years, and it was “very strange” her not being at home. Then there was the elderly man on the Docklands Light Railway who I spoke to when a signal failure held the train for 20 minutes. Every time I did manage a conversation, however fleeting, I felt a buzz (Photo: Sol de Zuasnabar Brebbia/Getty)
We discussed clothes for a while, then moved on to his new dog (should he name him after a Buffy the Vampire Slayer character, a Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestant, or just Max?). The next day a man was eating a box of chicken on the bus wearing an amazing lime green shirt. Even when it turned out that the new white blobs on my jeans were mashed potato the T-Rex had been ‘fed’ for lunch, I felt a rush of relief and happiness that this was going so well. His mum apologised but I didn’t mind, I was high on the fact I was talking to two strangers now. He thrust a dinosaur model at me, the T-Rex’s tail swinging into my forehead. The child began telling me with great enthusiasm about his day at the Natural History Museum.
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