It's Good to Talk

I'm at my parents' house this weekend and yesterday morning after I came back from a run my dad was on the phone chatting to a friend. It struck me really forcefully how little I call people for just a general chat these days - my phone calls are either work-related or quick calls to Andy from the car. Pretty much the only people I call for a catch up are my parents.

It's a bit of a millennial meme that this generation don't do phone calls but wasn't always like that. Obviously when I was a kid, before mobiles came along, a telephone call was pretty much the only way of staying in touch. But even once mobile phones became ubiquitous I used to spend a lot of time on the phone, particularly with some of my university friends. We weren't talking about anything in particular, just catching up on the details of each others lives. I don't really know when I stopped phoning people, I can't pinpoint a point in time when I decided to stop speaking to my friends but it's sometime in the last ten years or so. Of course that doesn't mean we're not in touch, we comment on each other's social media posts, we send Whatsapp messages, we text. In some ways we're more connected than ever - social media has probably kept alive a lot of friendships that would have died due to time and distance twenty or thirty years ago. But it sometimes strikes me that the connections we have are more superficial, less intimate. I know the highlights of lots of people's lives but often that intimacy that a chatty phone call could bring is missing.

Of course it's not just a technology thing. Many of the friends I used to spend hours talking to have small children and I doubt they have time to spend shooting the breeze just because I'm overcome with a fit of nostalgia. But I do wonder about the lost art of the phone call. I spend so little time on the phone that often the fact that someone is ringing me makes me slightly anxious or worried that something awful has happened. I often ask "is everything ok?" as a kind of reflex action when someone calls, the assumption that people only make phone calls when it's absolutely necessary driven deeply into my psyche. The convenience of other forms of communication backs that up - a call means someone has to stop what they're doing to speak to you, a text can be replied to as and when. Is the telephone call as obsolete as letter writing or could it be one of those things, like records, that makes a comeback? Am I just being ridiculously nostalgic for a world that never really existed?

What I've Been...

Reading:
I bought Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien about 18 months ago - I can't remember why, I think I'd seen it recommended somewhere - but for some inexplicable reason didn't start reading it until a few weeks ago. It is, however, possibly one of the best books I've ever read. On one level it's an intergenerational family saga but on another it's a deep exploration of Chinese society since the 1949 Revolution that brought Mao Zedong to power. I found it a little difficult to get into at first as it interweaves past and present so thoroughly but I was soon absorbed by the beautiful storytelling and tragic story. I've never really studied any Chinese history so was almost completely unaware of the context which actually meant I got to experience it unfolding through the course of the story which was interesting.

Listening to:
I've spent quite a lot of time listening to the new Christine and the Queens album Chris which is really excellent. It's an evolution from the first album Chaleur Humaine in that it's a more funky, electropop feel but I actually think it's a better album, mostly because the vocals and the lyrics feel much more self-confident. I am very disappointed that all her UK tour dates are sold out!

Doing:
One of my goals for this year was to take some proper German classes - and I finally got around not only to signing up but actually attending some! I'm doing some evening classes at the University of Leicester which is a bit strange - it's the first time I've done any kind of formal learning since I left university in 2006 I think. I've been learning German on Duolingo for a few years - I started when we went to Salzburg in 2016 and then kept it up thinking I might need language skills in a post-Brexit world so I'm not a complete beginner but it's a shock to the system to actually have to try and speak German to other people! Fingers crossed I can master the accent soon...

A mere three week gap this time, getting better... See you next time! Cx