She was in the accessories section, holding a pair of elegant lambskin leather gloves. Her voice cut through the pre-Christmas clamour like long-ago elocution lessons.
“I love these. They’d go with everything,” she was saying to someone.
A friend, I presumed.
They’re lovely, the other voice agreed.
“Aren’t they? Just fabulous.”
Nosiness got the better of me, and I turned for a better look. They were lovely: soft black leather, with an understated brass buckle, the kind you could imagine on Audrey Hepburn.
“I love gloves.”
She seized on my interest.
“You can never have too many.”
She glanced at the pair I was holding: practical, waterproof, fleece-lined, internet-enabled, and nuclear holocaust-proof possibly.
A December in Ireland – after three years of winters that really don't deserve the title – will spark an interest in practical gloves in the most stylish of us.
“I think you should go for leather,” she advised, handing me a black pair with a flower embossed on them. “You couldn’t go wrong with those.”
I took her advice but then, because I was busy, and I had three children to shop for, and a dinner in Dublin to get to, I thanked her and left her to it.
Missed connection
The shop sucked me in, the way those cavernous, overheated discount stores do. Almost an hour later, sweating heavily and laden down, I was leaving, when I heard a familiar voice coming from the accessories section.
“I love gloves. You can never have too many of them.”
I stole a glance on my way out. She’s still there, engaging someone else in a conversation about the merits of leather.
“You can’t go wrong with leather.”
I thought about her on the way to Dublin. How, whenever I wear those beautiful black leather ones, I’m going to regret that I didn’t take a bit more time to talk to her. How maybe it’s not the gloves she’s so interested in, as the few moments of human connection.
Early the next morning, I ended up – overtired and under-caffeinated – in a tiny delicatessen in south Dublin. There was a young woman there too, trying to focus on the array of breads with unlikely combinations of ingredients, while her toddlers concentrated on plotting an escape.
Maybe she reminded me of a time when I had two toddlers, and when Sunday mornings were a desolate landscape of Peppa Pig and chilly walks. (Now that I have one toddler and two older children, who can be paid small sums of money to sit and watch Peppa Pig, my Sunday mornings are a lot better.)
Or maybe I was thinking of my missed connection with the lady with the gloves. Either way, I found myself striking up a conversation.
“Your children are very cute,” I said which, as an ice-breaker, is less original than gloves, but in this case it had the benefit of being true.
In under seven minutes, we had worked out that we had both moved back from California around the same time; and knew several of the same people.
Eight minutes later, we were swapping numbers and promising to go for coffee to compare notes.
Orgy of socialising
This week, all over the country, people will be gathering and doing what people have always done, but these days seem to do less often: making connections. New ones, old ones, passing ones, lasting ones.
It is something that is hardwired into us, as naked and fundamental a human need as food or water.
And yet, come January, we’ll retreat behind our doors and our smartphones, relieved that the orgy of socialising is over for another year.
Scientists discovered a few years ago that the pain of social rejection is not a metaphor: it is a real physical pain, an evolutionary signal that we need those connections.
There’s now a growing body of research urging us to create a culture of consensual and empathetic interactions between strangers – including experiments like the one that recently provoked horror in London, when badges emblazed with the words “Tube chat?” were handed out on the Underground.
In this country, of course, we don’t need badges.
We're natural-born talkers. We've always made connections easily – living on a small island on the edge of Europe, you don't have a lot of choice.
But in the last few years, we seem to have lost our way a bit.
Our society is being engineered to make those connections more elusive; we spend so much time staring down into other people’s best faces on our phones that we forget to stop and look into the unfiltered faces around us.
Children are brought up to be frightened of strangers – a sensible precaution, but one that may be costing us in ways that are difficult to measure.
Like the rest of the Western world, we have become less of a community, and more of a collection of independent creatures on a path to our individual destiny, even as the neurons in our brains are screaming otherwise.
This week, do yourself a favour and find a stranger to talk to. Do it in person, not via a screen. You might even enjoy it.