understanding

I am an old fashioned sort of girl.

Big statement that. Sounds like it defines me, but don’t stop there if you please. I can be new fashioned in many ways when it suits me.

The thing about Big Statements is that they can confuse. For instance, if I were to say ‘That man over there is an irascible old bore’ and you didn’t know anything about him, you could think that being irascible, old and boring is the sum of the man.

Which it most definitely is not.

Nobody is that simply wired.

I love language, the rise and fall of a phrase, especially, in the way my dad used to deliver them for maximum impact. He used short words now and again, when he was playing the irascible old bore and the tonic water wasn’t cold enough, but in the main, he made language sing and he taught me well how to communicate. This is not to say that in order to communicate we need to be graduates in English, or Scottish, or any other language, for that matter. Words in the wrong mouths however cleverly phrased and delivered, can be as welcome as a fire in a paper factory, and as destructive.

In the world of technology, this new crazy fast non-human way of communicating, I find the old fashioned girl in me lurching into the foreground. I know it is the new way to tell out our latest product, opinion, story, but it is not the only way. We do not need to drown our voices in an ocean of electronics. Deep inside every one of us, is the need for human contact, for the soothing velvet sound of a loving voice, for the kindly helpful efficiency of a stranger on the other end of a telephone.

No electronic recorded voice can do that for us. We need voice to voice in order to reach a new place together. Yes, a recording can guide us through a button-pushing and monotonous process as we plod our way to submitting our white meter reading for the quarter, but oh what joy it is, what heart-lifting warmth fills us when a real person says those loving human words ‘Mary speaking, How may I help you?’ I can almost hear the angels in the background, as she pauses for my reply.

I remember meeting my first robot. She (was it?) answered with tick-tack words and no music to her phrasing. I thought, this’ll never catch on.

So, Big Statement. I am an old fashioned girl in the world of Communication.

I can also dance you off the floor when the DJ racks up the beat, and I can weep when Piglet gets blown off his feet in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I love that saying, although it is written in a rather old fashioned way. To me, it means I put everything into everything, from cooking supper on an ordinary Monday, to dressing up for a book launch. Haven’t got to that bit yet, but when it comes, I know I will give it wellie. Its not always easy to do, especially around the dull to-do list, month after month, nor is the ‘sowing’ part always obvious to the naked eye. For example, as I spend my days with my son and his wife and very new baby, quietly in the background, just helping as best I can at this time of immense change in their lives, I notice things. I notice that he orders baby clothes with great care and enthusiasm. I notice that he changes nappies and takes the baby out to give his wife time to sleep, for her nights are no longer her own. I notice he bothers to shop for groceries after a long day at work, and these are just 3 things I notice.

What he is doing, is ‘sowing’. He is investing, not only in his child, but more importantly, in his wife, in the woman she really is and this investment will pay off for the rest of his marriage. Not that he has planned it this way, of course not, but he is doing it because he is unafraid of looking soft in the head. All the young fathers I have met nowadays are similarly unafraid.

So Hallelujah say I for this ‘informed’ generation! They must have read all the right books, for they have certainly U-turned on their own fathers technique, or lack of it. Or, is it simply that Love will ‘out’, no matter what, given enough time?

Either way, my heart is smiling for the little ones of today. The big ones too.