SMALL TALK

No lunch with the Intrepids today so I had to queue up at the coffee van with everyone else.

I can't do small talk. While the coffee machine in the back of the van whooshed and hissed like a steam engine, and the queue of toe-tappers waited for their skinny frothy double caramel macchiato lattes or whatever it was, I stared around the car park trying to think of something to say.

How do you get your shirts so neatly pressed? Er, no.

How about that recent football match, eh? Um, do you actually know anything about football?

So, who do you think'll be the next Prime Minister? Urgh.

This is why I hate parties where you have to mingle - feels like you have to break the ice when all you've been given is a cocktail stick.

At a work thing the other week I went all-out on the small talk and it turned into big talk way too quickly. A conversation with one of the placement students ended up with me asking:

"So you must have a plan then, you're surely not just going to play games for the rest of your life?"

Which turned out to be his actual plan - he's studying video game development, and wants to go to South Korea to take it further. I suggested that there might be an end of level boss waiting for him at Seoul airport, but he didn't find that particularly funny.

Then there was the conversation with Eloi about Catalonia. It was a nice awkward bit of small talk until I essentially and accidentally accused him of being a separatist and demanded that Gibraltar stays British. Not only had I mixed up political issues on the Iberian peninsula but I'd accidentally accused him of being Spanish in the process. Never, ever refer to someone from Barcelona as Spanish.

On another occasion, small talk with Marie in the kitchen turned into a massive lecture about the difference between being optimistic and being naive. I argued that it was much better to be optimistic about life because you spend more of it being happy; she maintained that a natural pessism left room for anything good that happens feeling like a bonus, and that instead of the cheery optimist I appeared to be, actually I'm more like a 'naive simpleton'. Small talk turns to big talk quickly, it seems.

And I don't mind big talk. I just resent the fact that sometimes you have to go through small talk to get there. I would much rather sit in a corner and watch the ice melt than actively poke it with a cocktail stick.