The value of being heard

As regular readers probably know, and as friends almost certainly do, I'm an incorrigible people-watcher. I'm also an incorrigible ear-wigger, but in my defence it's often the case that I'm on a train or in some other fairly quiet public place and you just can't help becoming tuned in to a particularly loud voice raised over the top of others.

And so it was on Tuesday that I (and, I suspect, the rest of the train) overheard a woman striking up a conversation with the bloke opposite her. In fact, "conversation" would be a misleading term to use - she was actually talking at him for the best part of half an hour, receiving only the most minimal responses in return. She talked about everything from shopping in Derby to her fondness for Marks & Spencers cherry tomatoes, but it was with the brief but rather telling allusions to her medication and to the recent death of her mother that she reminded me of the characters from 'Talking Heads', Alan Bennett's wonderful series of monologues. Like them, she was evidently very lonely - desperate to talk to someone, and for someone to listen to her and her opinions. She also mentioned a pen pal in Southampton with whom she'd lost contact - my guess being that the lapse was not down to her.

So I sat stewing uncomfortably in the same feelings that Bennett's characters stir up - they're painful to listen to, pitiable (though Bennett succeeds in making you feel slightly appalled at the judgement and sense of superiority this necessarily involves) and pathetic (in the original sense of the word) and yet at the same time strangely heart-warming and peculiarly British. What must it be like, I wondered, to have no-one you can share your thoughts with? No-one you can voice your opinions to? No-one you can even babble inanities to? I think we all at times need the validation of having a listener, to prove and reaffirm our own self-worth - what must it be like not having anyone you can always count on for this?

But, it struck me, this is just what much blogging is about. Blogs are the equivalent of sitting on a train voicing your thoughts and opinions in the hope that someone might show an interest, listen and find some value in what you have to say. Whether it's arrogance or self-indulgence or whatever (and I always feel like I'm being accused of arrogance or self-indulgence whenever someone asks me why I write a blog), we feel the need to write, the need to say things.

Of course, many bloggers (including myself, at times) insist they're doing it for themselves, that it doesn't matter whether anyone else is reading or taking pleasure from it. But I suspect that, deep down, every blogger wants to know at least SOMEONE is reading. The comments box isn't so much put there by the thick-skinned blogger so that readers can express their own oppositional viewpoints or criticise the opinions they've read, but so that the blogger, in reality rather thin-skinned I think, can be gratified by evidence that their thoughts are not only being read but also being validated by positive comments. Regardless of what anyone says, I'm sure everyone feels at least slightly nettled by a negative comment, and it's gratifying to think that (overlaboured metaphor alert!) in the overcrowded and incredibly noisy train that is the web some people regularly choose to listen to your voice in preference to others.

I'll say quite categorically, too, that I'm very glad to have tuned in to all your voices in amongst the incessent bloggers' babble - by clicking on any of the blogs on my sidebar I can guarantee I'll be listening to a voice I want to hear. And what's quite exciting is the knowledge that there are so many more intelligent, witty, stylish voices out there I've not yet picked up on.

A postscript: I sometimes wonder if SWSL has a distinctive 'voice', in the same way that brilliant blogs like Little Red Boat, Troubled Diva, No Rock 'N' Roll Fun and Arpeggio do. Sometimes it strikes me that SWSL is a bit schizophrenic, skipping from match and gig reviews to books and politics and then to light-hearted trivia and inane and bilious opinion. What does anyone else think? I'd be interested to know. (Note shameless use of comments box for self-validation and vindication...)