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| What happens when humans hug |
I posted this picture (from @RealBanksy on twitter) on my
Facebook timeline a couple of days ago. It didn’t attract many likes. I was
disappointed as in these turbulent, and often frightening, times this image feels, to me, like
a beautiful symbol of love and hope. My writing at the moment is going through what
could be called a dark phase. Like others I’m anxious and angry about the
injustices and inequalities that dominated 2016 and continue into 2017. In my
latest piece (Finding
Tory OR Whoops There Goes Our NHS (and our social care, our jobs, our human
rights and so on and so on and so on) | Everyday Life in a Secret, Sneaky
Society) which I finished, and
posted on this blog earlier today (I hope you decide to read it) my focus was cuts, misinformation (and lies), distraction and the
need to keep fighting. I have decided that - not least for the sake of my
health, my head and my heart – that sometimes I need to focus on, and write
about issues and experiences, that make me feel happier and, at least a little, positive.
Despite recent evidence to the contrary I don’t just spend all of
my time obsessing about P/politics. Having left full time university work at
the end of 2014 I now work freelance and in the last 15 days I have travelled
from my home in south Cornwall to Aberdeen, Bath, Coventry and Plymouth. Next
week I’ll be in Belfast and Greenwich. I have moderated undergraduate
coursework, finished the first draft of a collaboratively written academic
article, done some administration for a journal I co-edit, reviewed a book
proposal, examined three PhDs and attended several meetings. I feel lucky to
have such interesting work, I am privileged to work with so many engaging
people. On Monday of this week I helped a friend plan a funeral (I’m also a
qualified Civil Celebrant) for a friend of his and I attended an information
evening for a charity that provides support to people in emotional need. I hope
to be accepted as a volunteer. In the last couple of weeks a couple of people
have been rude to me, but many others have smiled at me, or kissed me, or shown
me a kindness. At the weekend (see Grief and Loss, Emotional and Material
Concerns | Part Memoir, Part Rant (also this blog)) a dear friend drove me
to the graveyard where my parents are buried close to the anniversary dates of
both of their deaths. Yesterday the same friend and I went to the cinema. We
chatted before and after the film and laughed and cried a little during the
showing. A few days ago I spent a delicious couple of hours chatting to another
lovely friend whilst her five week old daughter slept and gently snorted on my
right shoulder. On Twitter and Facebook supportive words from new and long established friends have made me smile and given me confidence. On trains and in shops greetings and brief exchanges have brightened my day. I am warmed by and grateful for such experiences and encounters.
During my mum’s final illness at the turn of 2011/2012 I wrote a short story
entitled Normal Hugs. It was one of
my first attempts at fiction and I make no claims to quality. This week though
I’ve found myself thinking about it again and include some excerpts here:
As she
drives away from the school Liz finds herself thinking back to an article she
read in the paper a few days ago. A normal hug lasts just about three seconds
apparently. Any less and it’s not really a hug, doesn’t convey the right amount
of affection or concern; any more and the recipient, if not the giver, of the
hug begins to feel uncomfortable. She has always hated the word normal and
makes it a personal quest to challenge the norm when she can….
… a
coffee with her friend Gill in town. An event bound to cheer her up. Sipping a
skinny cappuccino at Belle’s whilst she waits, having arrived 15 minutes before
she knows Gill will, Liz finds herself watching the other café dwellers. There
are several rendezvous. A couple of men in suits shake hands, hitch up their
trousers and huddle over espressos and a laptop. Two sets of 30 and 40 something
women kiss, hug (for just less than three seconds Liz estimates) and settle
over their various milky coffees to chat. An older woman rises to greet a
younger woman and an almost school age child. These intergenerational greetings
she finds the most interesting: a hug for the woman, ‘normal’ again (Liz
imagines the single quotation marks in her head) but a tight squeeze and a rain
of kisses for the girl which make her squeal with delight....
Her
shift [as a librarian] passes quickly and as ever is full of variety. She does a stint on the
desk, talks to several regulars, gives recommendations to readers from a number
of generations and spends some time cataloguing. There is plenty of time for her
hug research also and she is struck by just how common hugging is. As in the
coffee shop and the gym women are more likely to be both the givers and
recipients of hugs. She wonders when it became so commonplace, when close
physical contact became so popular in a country whose inhabitants have a
reputation for being stiff and undemonstrative. She concludes that perhaps it is the result of North American influences and a shadowing of behaviours in movies
and television programmes. Whatever, she decides she likes to see and
experience it as a form of greeting, of farewell or of spontaneous affection.
She is the happy recipient of a few hugs herself during the afternoon. The
first is from a woman, a new visitor to the library, who tried the three
bookshops in town first. The talking book she wants is available for loan from
the library and when Liz finds it for her the woman smiles brightly and briefly
clasps her to her chest. Following the three pm story book session a couple of
the pre-schoolers thank Liz with hugs as does one of their mothers who is herself
an old friend….
I appreciate, of course I do, that such connection can be
unwanted and/or used to manipulate. Later in the story I wrote:
Driving
home she passes the railway station and stopped in traffic she sees an advert
for various railcards all promising a percentage cost off hugs to the lucky
owner. How strange that she should see this today of all days. Again, as on the
birthday cards she saw earlier, there are figures frozen in a perpetual clinch.
But this time it is people caught by the click of a camera rather than sweet
and slightly sickly images drawn by Hallmark, and similar, employees. There are
parents and their children, grandparents and grandchildren, friends, lovers.
She realises of course that these images are as staged as the ones on greetings
cards and that the depicted adults and children are likely to be actors, paid
for their time….
I know too that such behaviour is not a panacea for the social,
material and political unfairness, oppression and horror in our society and more globally. I know that
hugging a Fascist isn’t the solution, or even something that we might want to
risk. But, small acts of kindness, small displays of affection can help us all,
whether accompanied or not by physical touch, whether face-to-face or through
other forms of communication.
Here’s to more of it. And although I’m not suggesting that
we should wait for it before we act Random Acts of Kindness Week begins on February the 12th https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/
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