Article

Attention

Change

Character

Digital

8 January 2025

5 min read

“I’m just not good at staying in touch”

Rather than make excuses, be honest.

Iona Curtius

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth.

A woman holds her phone up in her hands and looks at it in a slightly vexed way.

David Suarez on Unsplash

This is an article about honesty… but we’ll get to that.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard some variation of the phrase “I’m sorry, I’m just not very good at staying in touch” or “I’m just terrible at texting, sorry”. Usually, such apologies are accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, a helpless smile, sometimes even a hint of smugness. Every time I experience such an interaction, I get a little closer to losing my patience. So, it’s probably safer for everyone if I voice my thoughts in this way, safely tucked away behind a screen.

What’s going on here? I believe it’s quite simple: dishonesty. Now, I don’t wish to unjustly accuse anyone of lying, much less assume ill intent. I’m sure everyone who has ever said that to me has believed it to be true. But, as we will see, that’s part of the problem.

Nobody is naturally ‘good at staying in touch’. Nobody is naturally ‘good’ at texting. These aren’t ‘natural’ forms of communication, or even ‘natural’ relationships. We have the opportunities now to meet and form connections with SO many more people than our forebears did. It is impossible to build, let alone maintain close friendships with everyone we meet. Relationships take work and effort, even with people we see regularly. So, what’s the problem with saying “I’m not very good at texting”? Isn’t it a normal, reasonable thing to say?

The problem is that it is used as an excuse. Just because something is hard or does not come naturally does not mean we can’t do it. We do hard things all the time, if we feel they are important and worth our effort. Doing the dishes doesn’t come naturally to me and I hate doing it. Still, I don’t invite friends over for dinner and then tell them, “Sorry, I’ve made food, but you’ll have to eat it out of the pot because I’m just not very good at doing the dishes”. I value my friends (and my health) so I do the flipping dishes. I’m not as on top of it as other people but I have found ways of helping myself to do a task I ‘naturally’ struggle with.

But back to the matter in hand: I believe that the aforementioned excuses are dishonest because finding texting hard is not actually the reason we don’t stay in touch with some people. What these phrases are hiding is “making the effort to stay in touch with you is not worth my time”. Now, obviously, most of us would never dream of saying anything quite so mean. But if we are honest with ourselves and look at our lives more closely, I do think that’s what it boils down to. Simply putting a nicer sounding lie in front of that does not make it any better.

So how do we get out of this? The answer is simple but not easy: honesty. Be honest. With yourself, above all else. Ask yourself, truly, “Why am I bad at staying in touch?” Are you trying to stay in touch with too many people at once? Is it a time management problem? Is it an attention problem? Do you simply forget someone exists if you don’t see them? It’s ok if that is the case. Just be honest about it. Once you have correctly identified what is making it hard you can decide whether you want to find ways to make those hurdles smaller, or whether you are simply going to be more honest in future. You don’t have to directly tell someone “You aren’t worth my time” (in fact, I’d strongly recommend not doing that). You can say something like “I find that maintaining (close) friendships at distance is particularly hard for me, so I focus on friends who are geographically close to me”. Or something similar. Be honest about the reason you find staying in touch hard.

If you are frustrated with how ‘bad you are at texting’, here are some ideas for how to make it easier on yourself. You might think about adding one or two of these to your routine at the beginning of this new year, perhaps.

If the problem is busyness or object permanence, set reminders and/or have ‘reply-amnesties’ where you reply to the texts from the week/fortnight/month. Some apps allow you to pin chats that are important to the top of your page, so you always see them when you open the app. Or, alternatively, you can archive those you don’t need so there’s less clutter. If the problem is the medium, texting feels impersonal, you don’t like having to be constantly ‘online’, or you live in a cave on a desert island, you can find other ways. Could you arrange (regular) calls? If you’ve recently won the lottery, you could send a letter by snail mail. Whether it’s voice notes, video updates, group calls, online board games, or Netflix watch parties, the possibilities are near endless.

One more thing: set expectations. Rather than simply telling people what you can’t do, tell them what they can expect. “Yes, I would like to stay ‘in touch’, but I prioritise the people who are geographically close to me.” “I won’t frequently reply to texts, but I do a reply amnesty every couple of weeks, so you’ll hear from me then.” If you do want to ‘be better at staying in touch’, let people know how they can help you. Maybe you struggle to initiate conversations but you’re happy to reply. Maybe you’re in a position to be able to say, “You can come visit me any time” or even “I’ll be in touch when I’m in the area and we can get together over a hot beverage or a meal.”

Just BE HONEST. Please.

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Review

Character

Culture

Film & TV

3 January 2025

4 min read

The utter humanity of Wallace and Gromit

Choices in front of and behind the camera tame technology.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A still from a claymantion film shows three characters, Wallace, Gromit and a robot garden gnome marching out a garden shed.

AI: here to help.

Aardman Animations.

In 1993, Aardman Animations released Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers. It follows hapless inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit as they rent out their spare room to a penguin, Feathers McGraw, who is subsequently revealed to be a master criminal, narrowly pipping Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh to the title of cinema’s most sinister villain. (Trust me: you will never look at a red rubber glove the same way after The Wrong Trousers).

At the film’s climax, perpetual good-boy Gromit chases McGraw through the house via a series of increasingly convoluted model railway tracks, even as he has to build the very tracks he’s riding on. There is a strong argument to be made that it is best scene in cinematic history.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2024, and Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is shown on BBC One on Christmas Day. It tells the story of Feathers McGraw – who has lost none of his quiet menace – plotting revenge on the eponymous duo, this time by taking over a series of technologically advanced garden gnomes Wallace has invented.

While nothing in Vengeance Most Fowl tops the train chase from The Wrong Trousers – indeed, how can one improve on perfection? – it is another magnificent addition to the Wallace and Gromit oeuvre.

Moreover, it is a remarkably prescient tale about the dangers of technology, and the beauty of humanity. It is the perfect antidote to much of modern cinema and almost single-handedly restored by faith in film as an artistic medium. Vengeance Most Fowl is such a success because it oozes humanity in every single frame. However, this humanity appears most clearly in three distinct ways.

First, in its story. The inciting MacGuffin of Vengeance Most Fowl is the new garden gnomes Wallace has concocted. Feathers McGraw takes control of Wallace’s gnomes by hacking into its software and switching it from ‘good’ mode to 'evil’ mode. (Like everything in life, this is a joke The Simpsons got to first: in 1992’s “Treehouse of Horror III,” Homer accidently buys Bart a Krusty the Clown doll accidently set to ‘evil’ mode rather than ‘good’ mode.)

Vengeance Most Fowl offers a more nuanced take on technology than most. It’s neither straightforwardly good nor straightforwardly bad; it depends entirely on the user. We see the benefits of the gnomes as they help people with their gardening. But put them in the hands of the wrong person – or penguin – and they become tools for evil. Vengeance Most Fowl is not an anti-technology film, then, but is realistic about the fact that some humans – and, indeed, penguins – will inevitably seek to use technology for nefarious ends.

Second, in its voice acting. Vengeance Most Fowl is the first Wallace & Gromit film released following the death of long-standing Wallace voice actor Peter Sallis. It is genuinely remarkable, then, that no AI was used by Aardman to replicate his voice. Instead, this is left to Ben Whitehead and the results are certainly worth it.

Where many film studios or production companies would have used technology to offer a ‘fake’ Sallis performance – think Peter Cushing in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, for example, or even the use of AI to reconstruct John Lennon’s voice for the lost Beatles single “Now and Then” – Aardman did not. Instead, they made a very conscious decision to have Whitehead offer a deeply human performance as Wallace. When (SPOILER ALERT) at the end of the film Wallace tells Gromit that he can live without inventing, but he can’t live without his dog, the emotional pay-off is so genuine because it is real. Because it is a thoroughly human moment.

Third, in its cinematography. Claymation is a medium only adopted by artists who hate themselves. That’s the only reason I can think for making an entire film using such a slow, tedious process. It is also a deeply human art form. It is the result of tens of thousands of hours of painstaking and repetitive work. It is yet another conscious choice by the team at Aardman to create something that is thoroughly and unmistakably human.

All of this, I think, says something about how Wallace & Gromit manages to feel like such a breath of fresh air. It has not been committee-d to death, or market research-ed into beige-ness. It is full of stupid little jokes (like Gromit reading Virginia Woof) and localised references (“Yorkshire Border: Keep Out!” followed by “Lancashire Border: No, Your Keep Out!”).

The cost of making Wallace & Gromit films is too costly for them to be cheap, mass-produced disappointments churned out at an increasing rate of knots. They are lovingly hand-crafted works of art and, given the current state of much cinema and TV, they are nothing short of minor miracles.