We’ve been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish

As everyone knows, Londoners don’t talk to strangers. And heaven forbid that anyone should make eye contact on the Tube. But despite having lived in the city for decades now, I’ve never really found this to be true. My average day out and about is punctuated by pleasant little conversations with strangers. Now and then, without too much effort, I’ve hit chat jackpot and got an entire life story out of a fellow bus passenger in seven stops.

It seems that for many years we have been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish

Still, old myths die hard, and Radio 4 is promoting the new series of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train by saying that the host’s mission is to ‘break the golden rule of travelling by train and actually talk to his fellow passengers’. I must confess that the one time I might not feel like talking to a stranger is if an encouraging voice came over the train tannoy, as it did here on the 11.46 East Midlands railway service from Nottingham to Skegness, and told me that Sayle was on board and ‘keen to chat to passengers about your journey today and also to hear your personal stories’.

I mean no disrespect to Mr Sayle, who seems a charming conversationalist, but for me the joy of public transport chat is that it is necessarily fleeting, unrecorded and without consequence, the opposite of that terrifying bar in Cheers where ‘everybody knows your name’.

But he had no shortage of takers, many of them on especially good form because they were en route to Butlin’s in Skegness. Two ladies from Bolton, named Leyla and Cecilia, came over to talk, sharp as tacks and headed for the holiday camp’s ‘Eighties bangers weekend’.

The general format is that Sayle asks his interviewees some things about themselves, and then gently spices up the mutual exchange with anecdotes about his showbiz career and well-known friends. Sometimes his stories take a turn into the patchy underbelly of fame: when appearing on Radio 1’s Roundtable once with Boy George, he said, a bunch of teenage fans rushed up to his
car, mistaking the figure inside for the pop star. Then they realised it was Sayle and turned away, miming vomiting. As talk turned to Bolton, he revealed that he spent the previous Saturday getting drunk with the actress Maxine Peake, an alumna of that town. ‘Name-dropper!’ chided one of the ladies, warmly.

The train chugged on, and he met a Derbyshire county council worker and a bride-to-be on her hen party. The latter’s fiancé had first proposed 20 years earlier, she said, but life and four children had got in the way of things. She worked as a nurse: ‘Endoscopy. In, out, up, down, everywhere.’ ‘I had a cystoscopy a few years ago,’ said Sayle, joining in with the spirit of things. ‘Oh did you? Yeah, nice.’

One of the pair – Karen or Donna, it’s hard to keep track – was heading to the Butlin’s party with three girlfriends, dressed up as ‘male icons from the 1980s’: she was going as Boy George, alongside Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson and Adam Ant. It sounded quite a night. Another interviewee, a worryingly laid-back history student, revealed that he hadn’t been to many lectures. Dreams and ambitions? ‘I’ll take it one step at a time. Roll with the punches.’

I do like Strangers on a Train. It’s one of those nebulous but touching concepts that radio can do very well, so long as it has the right host, which Sayle is: the son of a railway guard, he hits an attractive balance between probing and respectful. For the listener it’s a bit like being on a train yourself, overhearing interesting snippets drifting across from the seat behind – but without having to do any of the conversational work. Makes a nice change.

There’s always something new to feel guilty about, however, and now it seems that for many years we’ve been doing a monstrous disservice to fish – goldfish, especially – by ridiculing their tiny three-second memories. In fact they have quite formidable powers of recall, a talent illuminated in Naturebang, a bite-sized but interesting science series. According to Professor Culum Brown of Macquarie University in Sydney, rainbowfish can recognise one another, pass on knowledge, and – when he took them out of a net with a particular hole in it and put them back there again 11 months later – they immediately remembered their previous escape route, which is more than I can say for my own performance in Charing Cross station.

This brings us to another source of shame: apparently human memories are much more unreliable than we imagine. Julia Shaw, author of The Memory Illusion, talked on the podcast about how our brains ‘streamline’ memories, ‘deviating further and further away from the truth with each retelling’ – that is if these distortions are still retrievable at all, since much of my past is shrouded in mist like a giant Turner painting, with only a few details able to be picked out near the front. ‘So is a person just a collection of misremembered things?’ asked the host. A haunting and poetic thought. We’re going to need a longer series.