Earwigging

In a café last week I overheard two women in their early thirties talking about a friend. ‘She’s quit her phone’, one of them said. ‘Took up sewing.’ And then: ‘People aren’t quitting smoking any more. They’re quitting their phones.’

I scribbled it down immediately, recognising that what she was saying, without quite articulating it, was the beginning of a collective moment of realisation that our attention, and our peace of mind, is something that can be lost - and therefore something worth fighting to keep.

We know something has broken in the way we talk to each other. Just this week, Rowan Pelling wrote a risible piece of rage-bait for the Telegraph about women not having babies because they’re too influenced by Greta Thunberg. Tommy Robinson spouted racist fantasies to millions of followers. At a Kent County Council meeting, Reform councillors blocked the Green Party from presenting a plan on the water infrastructure crisis because they wanted to debate instead the reading of the Lord’s Prayer before meetings. What unites all of these - beyond the bad faith and naked corruption - is that they are stories told entirely in the service of self-interest, siloed by a profound ignorance of the real lives of others. Nobody is trying to think, nobody is attending to reality; they are all performing, inciting, and evading. The quality of our reasoning has collapsed, and we have collectively decided not to notice.

I’ve been teaching creative writing for nearly thirty years, and I think about this constantly, because writing stories is actually a sustained exercise in exactly the capacities we’re losing. Thinking about character means learning to inhabit a consciousness that isn’t yours. Dialogue means understanding how power moves between people. Thinking about plot forces you to consider the ways in which stories are structured and, therefore, political. Crucially, it’s a slow process – full of friction, you can’t rush it or scroll through the difficult bits.

The workshop - people in a room, reading each other’s work, trying to say something honest and useful - is one of the last places I know where this kind of attention is still practised as a discipline. And it feels, right now, less like a literary exercise and more like a form of political resistance.

George Monbiot calls it radical listening; Grace Blakeley talks about coming together as a collective. Both are urgently right, but they also assume that we still know how to attend to one another in the first place. I’m not sure we can take that for granted anymore. Attention isn’t a fixed capacity; it’s a faculty, and faculties waste when they go unused - which is why the workshop matters more to me now than it once did. It is one of the few places where we still practise this kind of attention, and it’s hard: to sit with another person’s words long enough to actually hear them instead of reaching for the easy verdict. The two women in the café had started to feel this, even if their friend reached for sewing rather than sentences. The instinct is the same: to take back the attention that was being spent on their behalf and spend it on something real.