"I can't imagine". Well...try?

I’ve been a bit quieter over the last fortnight, mainly because I’m working on a sample chapter for what will (hopefully - if publishers like it) be my next book; but also because I’ve been away on a Buddhist retreat. More on that anon, no doubt in a later newsletter. But I hope you’ve all been surviving, perhaps even thriving, while I’ve been busy.

This week’s newsletter is about a phrase that caught my attention while I was watching a TV programme as research for my sample chapter. The programme was from a series called Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild, from 2019, which is about people who have left conventional lifestyles in order to start again, with a deeper connection to the natural world. The episode I watched focused on a woman called Alexandra ‘Sandy’ Britton, who came to the Greek island of Andros as a young woman in the late 1970s and, in her retirement, has used an inheritance to establish an animal rescue called Magic Mountain, in the rocky heart of the island.

Fogle chats with Sandy, trying to fathom the deep attraction that Andros holds for her. When Sandy speaks, the camera rests tentatively on her facial expressions – which, like her voice, are tightly controlled and private – as if the operator is worried about intruding.

‘I don’t like small talk,’ she says. Her answers to Fogle’s questions are gentle and polite but clipped, and offer only glimpses of a clearly plentiful inner life.

‘It was OK’, she offers, a minute or so later, when Fogle asks about her childhood. She then elaborates that she had had an upper-class upbringing during which she was sent to boarding school aged nine, and her brother died by suicide. She smiles for a split-second, acknowledging the insufficiency of that description, it was OK. ‘I can’t really even imagine,’ Fogle murmurs in sympathy.