The Completely Unnecessary People

I think I may have accidentally stopped having a life.

Not in a dramatic way. There was no slammed door, no declaration that I was Done With People, no retreat to a remote Scottish island with six goats. I just got busy. Then overwhelmed. Then more busy.

Then apparently everybody disappeared.

I noticed this in Aldi car park, which is where all the great moments of existential clarity occur. I was sitting in the car watching people, moving around doing normal human things: returning trolleys, loading shopping, standing inexplicably in the middle of the road, taking seven minutes to reverse a Nissan Qashqai out of a space large enough to accommodate a combine harvester.

And I realised I didn't know any of them.

I've lived here on and off for a good part of my life. There was a time when going anywhere involved seeing somebody. Somebody from school, somebody's mother, somebody I worked with twenty years ago. Somebody who would say, God, I haven't seen you for ages, before we both embarked upon the socially agreed fiction that we must absolutely have coffee.

Now there was nobody. Wall-to-wall strangers. I seemed to have become a tourist in my own Aldi.

It hadn't happened all at once. I had simply run out of capacity, which is an irritating word because it makes a human being sound like a dishwasher. Maximum capacity: twelve place settings, three saucepans and one moderate family crisis. Unfortunately, it's also accurate.

For quite a long time now, there has simply been too much. Forms, phone calls, emails beginning Further to the below. There is always, somewhere, a password you cannot remember. Something needs answering, arranging, paying for, finding, cancelling, chasing or filling in. Gradually, anything optional falls away.

Unfortunately, people are optional.

This sounds much worse than I mean it to. I like people. Some people. Individually. Under controlled conditions. But friendship requires a certain amount of spare internal furniture. You need somewhere to put another person's life while they're telling you about it. You need to remember that their daughter has an interview on Thursday, their dog has diarrhoea and somebody called Claire at work is being a bitch again. You need to reply to messages. Occasionally you need to leave your house.

At my current level of capacity, someone saying Fancy a coffee? can feel less like an invitation and more like being asked whether I'd mind helping reroof a cathedral. So I've said no. Or I've thought I'll reply to that later, which is a remarkably effective system for discovering three weeks afterwards that you have accidentally ended a friendship.

People have, quite reasonably, got on with their lives. And I've got on with mine.

Except mine has become remarkably small.

The odd thing is that I haven't felt lonely, which is probably why I didn't notice. Loneliness sounds empty. This hasn't been empty. It has been absolutely fucking rammed.

There have been children and grandchildren and family and dogs and paperwork and houses and gardens and things going wrong and things needing doing and people needing answers and other people apparently needing the same answer for a second time. There has been no shortage of human contact.

What has disappeared is the contact that isn't attached to an obligation: the people who don't need anything from me and from whom I don't need anything either. The person you bump into and talk to for twenty minutes when you were supposed to be buying milk. The conversation that has no purpose. The invitation you accept not because it needs doing but because you quite fancy it.

The completely unnecessary people.

I think perhaps those are rather important.

And now, for some reason, I'm noticing their absence. I'm noticing the strangers in Aldi and the fact that I don't bump into anybody anymore. I'm noticing how long it's been since I did something simply because another human being said, Do you fancy...?

I'm not about to respond to this discovery by joining a book club, but I might want the edges of my world to expand again. A little. A conversation that goes nowhere. A person I wasn't expecting to see. Perhaps even coffee, although let's not make any rash commitments.

Somewhere along the way, without really deciding to, I closed the door on the bits of the outside world I didn't absolutely need. I was too busy to notice them disappearing and too occupied to miss them once they'd gone. The outside world, rather rudely, respected my wishes.

Now I'm standing behind the door thinking:

Well, you could have fucking knocked.