Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham

I probably shouldn’t admit this on national radio but I’m really bad at small talk. And I mean REALLY bad! Goodness knows I try, but despite my best efforts I will go from “hello” to “the meaning of life” in a very short space of time. So the conversation about the weather is never going to be: “The weather’s been odd this year. Lots of rain.” “Yeah, May was quite frosty, wasn’t it?” Oh no! For me I’ll deep dive straight away. 

“Yeah I know. If this year’s weather is an indication of climate change –well that’s going to have major long term implications isn’t it? I wonder if the experts who say we have passed the point of no return are right? Where does God fit in to it—with natural catastrophes, that is? I mean if humans caused climate change, we can’t blame God now, can we?”

I do breathe. I mean I wouldn’t just dump all that on someone in one go. I have SOME social skills!! It’s just the “skirting round the edges”, “polite conversations” end up making me feel awkward… really awkward, leading to some legendary social mishaps! Whereas deep-diving into the meaning of life seem quite natural to me. In Islam, the human is considered to be born with an essential “fitra” – an innate disposition towards compassion, intelligence, and beauty, capable of striving towards meaning, and finding true peace therein. So whilst I wish I was good at small talk – it seems a really useful skill to have - I actually don’t think I’m unique in all of this. I think a lot of people would have a lot of “deep” conversations about the stuff they care about given half the chance – it’s just we often don’t give each other half a chance. 

I reckon there’s a deep-seated yearning to make sense of the world, but that social norms have us brushing that aside – sort of embarrassed that we have overstepped the mark of “polite conversation”. We daren’t reveal much of ourselves for fear of rejection. Except – I don’t hold to such conventions, and thus there are a lot of people all over the world who have ended up with probably a lot more than they bargained for when they said to me, “Hello”. If you were one of them, I hope the conversation went well. If it didn’t…. umm… “The weather’s been odd this year, hasn’t it?”