Breaking The Ice With Strangers: Hook
The road is a lonely place.
Everyone’s a stranger. You long to connect with someone, anyone, but the odds are stacked against you. You’re in too much of a hurry to engage in social bonding rituals like feasting and hanging out. There’s the natural coolness in the air. And hey, you’re not your normal self right now – flung outside your comfort zone, living on your nerves and at the mercy of thoughts and whims born of sleep deprivation, addled body chemistry and sensory overload. Capping all that – you’re the outsider, with everything to prove.
The common reaction (if you’re like me) is to give up. To hide yourself away. Stiff upper lip, a sledgehammer air of authority you don’t feel and the kind of fixed expression you normally only see on Terminators and the acutely constipated. Lonely traveller, coming through.
But there are ways to improve your chances – and some of those vulnerabilities weighing heavy on your confidence are just the tools you need to make new friends.
Here’s how I reckon it works.
Dear PETA, Yours Despairingly (Once Again)
In what is turning to be a yearly series, I’m over at EcoSalon raising a weary eyebrow at the latest antics by the People For The Protection Of Animals.
The usual arguments apply: “Any publicity is good publicity” vs. “Hey, people are animals too” (because PETA’s human rights record is a little patchy).
So it feels good to poke fun. It feels good because it’s all so frustrating. They do good work, and they do terrible things.
It’s like two people, one of which is knitting a bright, jaunty scarf, the kind that keeps your ears really warm and is really useful and makes the world more colorful and fun – and the person next to them is unpicking the whole damn thing before your eyes, except in a way where the unpicked wool is twisted, taffled and knotted, the same infuriating way that mp3 player headphones get when you shove them in your pocket.
If the second person buggered off, I’d happily buy one of their scarves.
But they’ve got comfortable together.
That’s PETA.
Image: Shreyans Bhansali
How To See Airports (And Other Bad Places)
If you were traversing Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow last August, you may have seen a writerly-looking chap sat tapping on a computer, his words being displayed on a large plasma screen over his head. This was the temporary Writer In Residence, Alain de Botton, and he was writing a book about what airports really are.
The Human Scale Of Cold: How We Freeze (And How We Thaw)
What happens when you get too cold?
When we say “cold”, we usually mean one of two things. The first is the foot-stamping, hand-rubbing, nose-blowing kind that millions of us Brits are experiencing right now as we trudge through the slush, or curse when the snow billows in our opened car doors.
And then there’s the other kind.
Doctor Who Gets Whoier?
On Monday evening, a teary David Tennant stared out at 10 million of us, wailed “I don’t want to go!”, lit up like a Swedish straw goat and turned into Matt Smith (above). For the 11th time, British TV has a new Doctor Who.
A Few Things I Am Not
1. Dead.
2. Abroad.
3. An ex-blogger.
4. So enormously bloated from the amount of food I’ve eaten that my fingers are so swollen I can’t actually type or use a mouse.
5. Permanently drunk.
6. Permanently absent from here.
Just to reassure/threaten you. 
What Are Blog Comments For?
It’s all in the comments, folks.
Posted in: The Everyday, Writing and Blogging: Scribbling, Tapping, Twittering and Whittering.
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