I’m sauntering through the market on an errand to get lunch from Cafe Moor. There’s no rush. My next meeting’s not for about forty minutes, so I’ve plenty of time to dawdle among the stalls – you can get everything here, pigs heads, pink wigs, piles of potatoes, broken biscuits, prawn flavoured shapes (for when you have that peculiar hunger that only a prawn favoured shape could satisfy), every type of button, zip and general fastener imaginable, and even pictures of Jesus that switch from last supper to crucifiction depending on angle of vision – which is one of my favourite ways to spend an idle twenty minutes when I really could be doing something productive instead.
Just as I’m contemplating the shop that sells sew-by-numbers kits, and wondering who on Earth would want a stitched Arctic wolf or Red Indian Chief on their living room wall, I feel a tug on my jacket sleeve.
“Phiiiiiiiiiiil!”
I turn and make eye contact as the drawn out vowel runs out of steam and recognise someone I haven’t seen in almost a decade.
“Oh, hello” I say. “Nice to see you …”
She is smiling. She appears to be waiting for me to say something else.
“How are you?” I find myself saying.
As she starts speaking she steps forward, pinning me against an empty stall, blocking my exit. My solitary lunchtime reverie has suddenly become an enforced confessional.
For the next twenty minutes (it felt twice that, though I managed not to check my watch) I nodded and hmm’d and really’d my way through one complaint after another, hopeless circumstances piled upon hard luck and compounded by the nefarious behaviour of everyone who had ever entered her life … and then she started on the nephew, recapping in exhaustive detail his history (medical, legal and sexual) and her selfless struggle to set him right.
Halfway through I caught the eye of the lady who works in the bag shop opposite where I was standing and she shrugged as if in commiseration.
Eventually I had to shuffle to my right and slip out of her clutches else I feared I would scream maniacally or shout something mean like, “Lord, make it stop!”. She was still in full flow when I shot off without a proper goodbye. What a rotten thing to do. But she was in the middle of some story that seemed frankly preposterous and I was sure my facial expressions simply oozed incredulity. I didn’t want to offend. It felt the best thing – or the least worst, whatever is the difference – was to disengage.
I’ve been feeling terrible about it all afternoon though. Should I have bitten my tongue, put my own thoughts and feelings to one side and “been there” for her? She was obviously under the pressure of some internal distress and needed to vent. But I barely knew her, hardly more than passing acquaintances really. If we’d been closer – if we’d been friends – I would have been more honest about my disbelief and my boredom (obviously only if I knew that as a friend she could take that news; I’m not a moral monster.) And if we’d been friends I might have known better what to say and do. As it was I had no context and no guarantee that my actions wouldn’t make things worse. And then I would have felt worse too.
I’m beginning to feel the same way about Twitter too. In fact I am starting to avoid Twitter for the very same reason I’ll avoid the person I bumped into earlier; anxiety about becoming implicated in a problem I can’t solve, a story I can’t connect with, a person I neither know nor share any history with.
Maybe I’m just shallow, but I see Twitter the same way I see a stroll around the market. It’s a distraction. I engage with it in a spirit of amusement and wonder and sometimes distaste (pigs heads are not exactly pleasant!) I expect people to be loud and self-promoting and often selling stuff that’s just plain crap, but that’s all part of the fun. I also expect there to be lonely and troubled and desperate people here too. But in a market there’s no expectation that anybody else is there for any other than self-regarding reasons. Nobody is under the illusion that any other visitor should have an interest in our personal problems or is under any obligation to offer help. That people frequently do stop and help is wonderful, but it’s not the main function of a market and there’s no point bewailing the fact that 99.9% of people walk by missing much of the misery.
I only stopped in the market because I was collared. And that’s pretty much how I behave on Twitter.
I would have been quite happy to walk by on the other side of the road. I was looking for a sandwich. I wasn’t looking to be a Samaritan.