“You have a good job,” a head teacher once told me when I worked as a chaplain. “You go around having cups of tea with people and chatting.”
I couldn’t altogether disagree with her, I did have a good job, and I did drink tea and chat a lot. I did other, less pleasant, things too, but there was a large amount of tea drinking. And lots of chatting. I wasn’t going to apologise for it then, I still won’t. The opportunity to have a good chat, I think, is a fundamental social good.
Not all schools agree. When I was at school back in the 1980s and 90s I remember the clouds of smoke that used to billow from the staff room where literally all the teachers would gather at break time, apart from the poor soul who had landed ‘break duty’ (unless it was ‘wet play’ - in which case all bets were off). My observation these days is that most teachers seem to spend their breaks in their class rooms. Staff rooms are less well used than they were, and as a result the space is used for other things. This, it seems to me, leads to isolation. And that’s why it’s good to have a chaplain to chat to.
But schools are only one example. Isolation is everywhere.
The average American woman has between two and five close friends, and about seven different ‘lip products’ (lip sticks, lip balms etc.) leading the Guardian to wryly calculate that “the average American woman has more lip products than close friends.” In my experience, the person with five close friends is doing pretty well. The majority of folk seem to have far fewer.
Isolated in their homes, or offices, or classrooms, people just don’t have opportunities to chat. And so they don’t have the chance to share their worries, or their joys.
The difficulty of making, and maintaining, friendships, even in our globally connected world, has led to terrible loneliness. In 2023 the World Health Organisation declared loneliness to be a global epidemic, and said that it is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A bit like walking past a school staff room in the 1980s.
A 2020 study worked out that “social isolation or loneliness in older adults is associated with a 50% increased risk of developing dementia, a 30% increased risk of incident coronary artery disease or stroke, and a 26% increased risk of all-cause mortality.” Basically, loneliness kills.
This morning I spent a good ten minutes chatting to Brian, he moved north from his home in the south of England when he retired. “I wish I had moved up here years ago,” he told me, enthusiastically. He now spends much of the week going from one coffee morning to another. Today he’d made a batch of bread and butter pudding, cut into squares, which he offered around the room.
“It’s a southern delicacy!” He announced, proudly, before regaling me with an altogether unprintable joke. I shook my head, and grinned.
The beauty of a coffee morning is that it’s cheap, perhaps even free, to attend. It’s simple, it’s safe. The rules aren’t complex, and there’s no big entry fee. You don’t have to pay a fiver just to get a hot drink. You can get involved, do the washing up, buy a raffle ticket, tell outrageous jokes, bring some cake. The barriers are low. You can make friends.
Could something as simple as a regular coffee morning really help save, or extend, someone’s life? If it breaks down the poison of social isolation and means that people actually have friends in an all too friendless society, then perhaps yes it can.
Sometimes the simplest things are the most effective.
No milk for me, ta.