Talk Isn’t Cheap

Talk Isn’t Cheap
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 14, 2015

Small talk is the art of saying nothing in particular. This, in itself, constitutes a problem. Among strangers, I quail at converting my interior monologue to an exterior dialogue. What if my listener thinks I’m a braggart? Or a bore?

I have no issue with talking per se. I can efficiently convert my James Joyce-ian stream of consciousness to sound: words babble from my mouth with ease. I like to fill the gaps in conversations before they turn into unpleasant silences. I can talk incessantly by yoga-breathing through my nose.

But in social settings, the pressure to be entertaining makes me skittish. I fear my awkward thoughts will produce awkward conversation. (I like to save my eccentricities for my friends). One glass of champagne and I begin to prattle.

Last Wednesday at a festival launch, I found myself wedged against a retired but fashionable gentleman in a shirt printed all over with pineapples. I was trapped with him between a table of hors d’oeuvres and a staircase. He began pumping me for tips on how to attract an audience to his blog.

“My concern is how to make it authentic,” he said earnestly.

“Well, that’s not a problem,” I replied, warming to a favourite topic. “Just write about what you know. Don’t fake it. Readers can always tell when you’re making it up.”

“I write from the perspective of my cat,” he said.

Caught in the stare of his unblinking eyes, my smile died on my lips. The air between us turned crisp. I took a gulp of my champagne and tittered as we plunged into a conversational black hole. I contrived my escape by pretending to greet a familiar face amongst the sea of heads beyond him.

“Can you excuse me?” I said. “But I’d like to talk more about your cat later.”

And away I weaved from the feline impersonator to camouflage myself amid the humid crush at the bar.

Waiting for the barman’s attention, I cringed at my conversational misfire. I shouldn’t have been so strident. Would the poor blogger’s ego reinflate? I ordered a spritzer and kept my third eye roving on alert against an incoming pineapple shirt.

What constitutes good small talk? I have discovered that often, it involves complaining. We women, in particular, like to bond over mutual hatreds and petty grievances. At a friend’s 50th just before Christmas, I tuned into the chatter of two women in our queue for the loo.

“Ugh! How hot was it today?” said one.

“And humid!” replied the other. (Mutual rolling of eyes).

“My hair turns to frizz in this weather!” said the first woman.

“I know. I know. Makes me pine for winter.”

Her friend lowered her voice: “Though I see Sharon’s enjoying the heat – does she have to come bra-less to everything?!”

I gawped to recognise Sharon as a former workmate as she bounced out of the stall.

As an over-confident 20-something, I was keen to show off my verbal thrust and parry. In my world of work, small talk was not just a rudimentary exchange or a comfort zone when drinking. It could open doors. Enhance reputations. Small talk had winners and losers.

But I found the competition exhausting. The extroverts were bent on outsmarting and outcharming each other. The introverts were ignored. The rest of us couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes at parties, I’d adjourn to a corner and study people’s faces as they interrupted each other. Their gaiety just looked forced.

There’s something civilised about allowing pauses in a conversation. We all want to plug a silence, but it’s remarkable how interesting other people become when they’re allowed time to collect their thoughts.

My husband does not require small talk to sustain his entertainment. In varying degrees, it bores him, drains him and irritates him. When I’m sharing scuttlebutt about Julie Bishop’s hair, I’ll see his eyes narrow and his forehead crease into a frown. He’s trying to comprehend how this conversation could interest anyone. He’s not being superior – he just doesn’t get it. To him, idle chatter is the noise we make on our way to meaningful conversations – like the pros and cons of floating the Swiss franc. He specialises in big-talk, a la Winston Churchill, but with hair.

So in this, the Year of the Goat, I have decided to perfect my small talk. I will charge into spontaneous conversations with strangers and shine. I will be ebullient and charming and my single entendres will double. I will deliver my repertoire of Rose Hancock anecdotes and expect my audience to clutch their stomachs and hoot. And when I find myself next to the bra-less Sharon at the checkout, I’ll be brave and say: “Thanks for pretending you didn’t see me in the Weetbix aisle, Shaz. I wasn’t in the mood for small talk either.”

Fall on Deaf Ears

Fall on Deaf Ears
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 1, 2014

Between man and wife, listening is an art form. It is an elusive skill, requiring mental endurance and an air traffic controller’s concentration. (In our house, most conversations are near misses between my mouth and his ears). Moreover, listening requires self control – the word listen contains the same letters as the word silent. My family has no restraint. Usually, we’re too busy interrupting one another to hear what’s being said.  

The man of the house, however, has turned marital listening into an exercise in subterfuge. He has enough rat-cunning to convince me he’s paying attention to my every word, while really, he’s keeping track of the cricket score over my shoulder.

At stumps, I poked my head into his office and said: “By the way honey, what did you decide about tomorrow night?” He flashed me a meretricious smile: “Whatever you like, Blossom. I’m easy. You’re the social secretary, remember.”

And then our conversation degenerated into this tiresome patter:

“(Sigh) You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Depends…”

“Depends on what? Geez! Do you ever listen to a word I say?!”

“I was listening, I just didn’t think it was important enough to remember.”

Listening is now a prickly aspect of our relationship. I admit I do most of the talking, but he does most of the ignoring. To help himself annoy me more, my husband has mastered a second language: a vocabulary of eye rolls, gruntlets, exasperated head shaking and a raised right eyebrow (of doom). He uses these to stymie all conversation so he can continue reading about Nigella Lawson’s cocaine habit in peace.

I get bored unless I’m talking. I like to fill the gaps between conversations with  commentary. During the Sunday night movie I get in trouble for asking perfectly legitimate questions: 

“Hey! Is that Terence Stamp? Man! He’s aged hasn’t he? No, no, it’s Alan Rickman, isn’t it? Yup, it’s Alan Rickman. He was so good as the bad guy in Die Hard, remember honey? He had that amazing German accent.”

And then my bloke rocks his head on his neck and his right eyebrow strains to push up a forehead wrinkle:

“No, it’s not Terence Stamp and it’s not Alan Rickman, it’s Charles Dance. Now will you please be quiet. I’ve proven to you I’m listening, all right?

And then I squeeze his hand and snuggle into his hairy left thigh because I know Alan Rickman when I see him.

Of course, we now have another listening problem creeping into our  relationship. Apparently I don’t just have a talking problem, I have a hearing problem. No matter that my bloke has a mumbling problem.

He likes to mumble with his back to me. He talks to me sotto voce from his office down the hall. He thinks his conversation is so riveting I should be craning my neck to hear what he has to say. I’ve now been forced into a speech pattern that begins with “Pardon?” And he’s cheesed off with having to repeat himself.  

I wonder if my years in radio damaged my ears? I always wore the cans lopsided, covering my right ear, exposing my left, so I didn’t have to hear myself booming in stereo – mono was disconcerting enough. Maybe my right ear got sick of listening to my voice? Maybe my left ear went out in sympathy?

My teenage son likes to mock my hearing by playing me high frequency tones on his iPod. While everyone in the house is screwing up their faces and sticking their fingers in their ears, I blithely continue stacking the dishwasher. (Raising three children gives me enormous tolerance for high-pitched shrieks and wails).

And then 13-year-old son guffaws: “Hey Mum! Can’t you hear that? Are you deaf? It’s hurting my ears!”

So now I’m being dared to have a hearing test because my husband mumbles and my son plays stupid test-tones only dogs and flappy-eared children can hear.

I have no trouble hearing the 60 decibel repartee of my two best girlfriends. We oracles know each other so intimately we don’t even call it listening: we call it waiting our turn to talk. But I was nonplussed the other day, at our favourite cafe, when one of my besties leaned into me and said: “Luvvy, I think you may be shouting.”

“I’m not shouting, I’m just excited about getting a hearing aid.” Should the espresso machine compete with some really important news, I make sure my smiling and nodding more than compensate for any lack of listening.

So in the interests of marital harmony, I have bowed to familial pressure and agreed to get a hearing test. I’m not too worried – I had one five years ago and got a near-perfect score. Selective deafness, the audiologist whispered to his assistant. He thought I didn’t hear him, but I’m brilliant at lip-reading.

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”