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Last week, at a work lunch, I found myself, quite inexplicably, running out of chat. It may have been jet lag, or just exhaustion, but I had zero to contribute. Sure, you say, that must have been a blessing. I tend to be a gobshite after all: happy to pontificate on any subject and spout unprompted opinions on all things.
Still, running out of conversation seemed like a massive professional fail. My job entails many dinners, and sitting next to strangers. The most basic requirement of a journalist is to have a natural curiosity. Not just in journalism — being an easy conversationalist strikes me as being a huge advantage in almost every occupation. And while some may be happy to pickle in the silence of the suspended dialogue, in my experience, not making any effort just makes for a long, lonely, awkward night.
As a teenager, I used to cringe from small talk. I was desperately self-aware. Approaching clusters of my peers on the steps of the school library, I would practise cute conversational openers in my imagination but go mute when it came to spitting out the words. So great was the fear of judgment. So much terror of saying the wrong thing. While I could blather on for hours in the classroom about Macbeth’s intentions, amid the hum of social chit-chat, I lost all my confidence.
In the decades since, I have learnt that no one really cares what you say. For all the anxiety and nervousness with which one approaches interactions, most people are too preoccupied with their own fears and insecurities to much consider yours. Unless you’re desperately rude or highly precocious, people don’t tend to judge. Most of the time we’re pretty grateful that someone is prepared to talk to us at all. Everyone is awkward. Few people are natural (and even fewer, gifted) raconteurs. How then to launch yourself into a conversation with someone who is unfamiliar and when the stakes are still unclear?
The ancient wisdom that one should never talk about politics or religion is only useful inasmuch as you can ignore it whenever you so please (I used to work with one editor who would routinely ask people whether they believed in God). Notwithstanding custom, most people are quite keen to cut to the chase. You can dispense with the weather drivel pretty quickly and get into something deeper by the second course.
How you choose the subject depends on your own sense of verve. Years ago I found myself sitting next to Martin Amis, the literary provocateur. He was no longer handsome but still had that easy swagger of someone used to people hanging on their every word. By then he was entering his late feminist, Islamophobic phase. He opened: “I’ve always thought you can find out everything you need to know about a person by asking where they sit on the question of Israel and Palestine.”
Suspecting the question was more a test of my reaction than any interest in what I really thought, I responded with the most facetious answer I could think of and made an eejit of myself. I had zero desire to parry politics with Amis. I was clearly going to fall short. The only dignified solution was to behave like an idiot. The conversation flowed fairly freely thereafter, although thinking back to it I can feel my palms begin to sweat. It takes a certain personality to use a pick-axe to break the ice.
I prefer to take the Freudian route and ask about someone’s early family life: the discovery that they are the eldest of nine children, or that, aged 10, they moved to Puerto Rico, or that their father abandoned them in childhood is far more revealing of character than asking about their professional portfolio, or what they think of the developments in Taiwan. Even when describing quite traumatic periods, people tend to be quite happy revisiting the past: everyone has a survivor’s story, or an early mentor who has helped shape the person they are today.
Then there are those times that are just desperate: in which every enquiry seems barbed. The chap going through a social scandal; someone whose business has just folded; the political candidate who’s spectacularly lost their seat. Do you politely dance around the subject, or go right in and lance the boil?
At another dinner, last week, I sat next to a film producer: a woman used to handling massive egos and managing dozens of personalities in a room. Early in her career, as a fairly timid woman entering a male-dominated world, she was counselled always to have two things at hand. “Firstly, you should have a joke. And secondly, a favourite book.” The theory being, that when things get sticky, you could diffuse the silence with a gag.
The thought of delivering a joke unprompted strikes me as the most terrifying of all: the fact that hers was about an Irishman would probably detonate a social cancellation in this day and age. Even so, it was gratifying to realise that even this profoundly influential person still fell back on conversation crutches when the need arose. Now where’s that knock knock manual? I’ll be prepared next time.
Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com