'My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation,' says Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion. And Mr Eliot replies 'that is not good company, that is the best'.
When the world was very young, people gathered around fires on the long cold nights and listened to a story-teller who kept them riveted until it was time to turn in. There were no breaks for advertisements, no trips to the kitchen for more snacks. It was just loincloths and the crackling of the flames against the cold of night, keeping the wild beasts at bay.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, people were invited to elaborate dinners and if you were lucky you might find that mix of people who were entertaining, who were the "good company" as cited by Anne Elliot. There were several inns and taverns and gentlemen's clubs where a collection of men (yes, mostly men) spent hours chatting about everything and anything. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of these eminent men of whom Charles Lamb said he would "talk forever and you wished him to go on forever". Charles Lamb himself was a great essayist and presumably just as entertaining in conversation. Their Table Talk writings are still available today. Entertainment meant meeting other people, not sitting over a mobile phone or watching a television set.
With all the different modes of entertainment at our disposal in this technical age, I think we have lost out on the pure entertainment of engaging in conversation with other people. Dinner parties were very social occasions. Of course you still had the bores and the gossips - the gossips being as entertaining as the most intellectual dinner guest, I'd say.
I sometimes get the feeling that people don't want to listen any more. They are too taken up with their own lives and only have a tiny timeframe for listening to what you have to say. Of course, we all have good friends who are more than interested to hear us talk about all the little things which make up our daily lives. We are also interested in hearing them out as they tell us their stories. But they are in the minority. If you were to sit down at a dinner table with a bunch of strangers it can be hard to get a decent conversation going unless you are lucky enough to have a few guests at the table who are interested in other people. There are those rare people who can tell an amusing anecdote - usually against themselves - to a group of strangers which everyone can relate to in some way. That is a gift, a rare gift and getting rarer, I sometimes fear..
I love listening to people telling me stories of things that happened to them or people they've met or places they've been. Many moons ago I worked with a girl very briefly in London and she could captivate the whole office with her stories. She gave a thrilling account of the film Play Misty for Me which
was newly released at the time. Much later I tried to watch this on
television and, you know what? it was boring in comparison to the way
she'd told the story. I was sorry when I had to leave as she was in the middle of a romance with a guy she had just met in London. She'd told us every stage of it, starting from Day One and I really wanted to know how it turned out.
My one fear is, though, that these fantastic, gifted oral story-tellers are dying out. Yes, we have books and shows that hold your attention but in my opinion there is nothing more satisfying than sitting down with someone who holds your attention for an hour, someone you can talk to about politics, climate change, whatever, and get an intelligent debate going. If they have a different point of view, so much the better. The story teller, the raconteur who can keep you entertained into the small wee hours is worth their weight in gold, rubies and diamonds. I so hope they are not a dying breed.
