I live a stone’s throw from Highbury Fields, a relatively dull expanse of grass notable largely for the fact that dogwalkers seem to congregate in the middle of it at about ten in the morning which, as far as I can make out, is an entirely spontaneous, yet regular gathering, though I wouldn’t know, not having a dog. Truth be told, I’m somewhat suspicious of the whole arrangement, though I have no evidence to suggest that it’s anything other than innocent. So far.
Anyway. I was walking to the tube the other day, and passed a girl crying on her phone. She was obviously fine, apart from the crying thing, so I pretended not to notice and walked on. But I’ve noticed that, apart from the sinister dog thing, people go to Highbury Fields to cry quite a lot. I don’t know what it is about the place. It’s hardly private, and in fact, there are few places you can sit in Highbury Fields without being seen by practically everyone else there. And it’s not a massively emotional place, either – a mundane, rectangular design, no exciting water features, exotic animals, or interesting flowerbeds – it’s sort of the sensible, conservative cousin of the much more intriguing Clissold Park, not too far down the road towards Stoke Newington. There are tennis courts near the Highbury Barn end, and a vaguely embarrassing bit at the top where it’s all a bit dark and grim even during the day, but in a ugh sort of way rather than a oooh kind of way.
But I rarely go through Highbury Fields without noticing someone weeping on a park bench, or against a tree, or even just sat there on the grass. Two generalisations at this point: they’re largely a) on mobile phones and b) women. Which isn’t to say I haven’t seen a man crying, because I have, just the once, though the first generalisation still held true in that instance.
And I suspect it’s less about Highbury Fields and more about the mobile phones. I suppose I can understand the logic – if you’re in public and about to have some kind of heart-rending conversation, these days you seek out the largest space you can find, as opposed to the smallest, where you’re more likely, paradoxically, to be heard. And somehow, a conversation in a wide space serves to dilute the problem in the open air. Or perhaps it’s something to do with having people around you, as though by being surrounded you’re sharing the burden of whatever tragic storyline is being played out. Misery loves company, even if it’s entirely involuntary.
It works, too. Every time I see some girl sitting by herself sobbing into her Nokia, I feel this enormous wave of sympathy. That girl I saw could have been having an affair with her boyfriend’s father while her boyfriend was in hospital recovering from the skin grafts he’d had as a result of saving orphans from a burning building and he’d just called to tell her he’d found out and I’d still feel sorry for her. The person on the other end of the phone, the invisible party, is always the villain of the piece.
And I think the phenomenon is weird. Once upon a time, a private conversation in public would happen in only one place – a phone box. There, the space was limited, the atmosphere intimate, intense. I’m old enough to have used a phonebox on a regular basis in my last year at university, when I religiously walked to the end of the road to phone my girlfriend back home and have long, often angst-ridden phone calls, a thrilling analogue cocktail of insecurity and suspicion. I always thought that’s why the little panes of glass in phoneboxes would crack eventually. It’s wasn’t vandals, but the pressure of grief and sorrow and regret and anguish bottled up inside that caused them to shatter.
I don’t know what happened to that need for privacy. If we need to spend, say, 5% of our lives in private, and mobile phones have decreased that level to 4.5%, what effect does the missing half percent have on society in general?
Less shattered glass around phoneboxes, I guess. And more traumatised squirrels in Highbury Fields.
