Phase 1

GOSSIPING AND GROOMING

(Goldilocks’ Dark Secret)

A girl with lovely golden hair was enjoying a walk in the woods one morning early when she found herself in a clearing. Set back in the trees was a little cottage from which she could smell a delicious odour. Outside on a little table were three bowls of porage.

Every journey has to have a beginning and I guess this fairy story is as good a place for me to start as any. A fairy story like this is probably where you started as well.  If it wasn’t my mother who read stories to me it would have been my sisters.  My childhood was filled with stories.  There were books and magazines.  Plays on the radio. Bible stories at Sunday School. Pantos in the village hall at Christmas. The usual.  Much the Same as you, I expect.  And there were also the other stories.  About characters we knew at first hand. People from the village.  Workers on the farm.  Histories. Great grandparents. A great Uncle who owned a sweet shop in Salisbury.  My Grannie’s brothers who were both express train drivers.  Shepherds. A Distant aunt with a wooden leg.  A neighbour who was a German prisoner of war and who stayed on.  An American serviceman who was part Cherokee. Gossip of People told with a knowing wink long dead or separated by circumstance or geography.  All this plus Goldilocks and her Ursine companions, became the gossipy woof and weft of the tapestry that bound us all together.

In his book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari talks about the central part that gossiping has in human interactions.  It’s an idea first put forward by anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar, who avers that gossiping establishes and reinforces hierarchies and alliances within groups.  He says it builds coalitions and becomes the mechanism for all social interaction and that gossiping is the manifestation in language of our primate instincts. And Professor Stephen Pinker says that language itself is hard wired into our brains so altogether it seems that this is something we just can’t help doing. 

Let me jostle in there with these big guns and suggest that story-telling is gossiping with a point.    And the point is to do with your and my place in the universe.

I’m not a primatologist but it does occur to me when I visit the Ape Rescue centre down the road from here and watch our chimpanzee cousins doing as Harari describes: grooming each other and gossiping whilst doing so, I’m behaving in exactly the same way when I’m telling a story. This Grooming gives the humble and much derided story-teller the means to hold the attention of the wise and powerful silver back for a brief moment.  I am allowed access to the top table merely by dint of being able to spin a good yarn, sometimes avoiding a cuff and sometimes even being rewarded materially for my efforts. 

I guess it was the rough and tumble of family life that taught me how to push through the crowd to be heard above all the chatter. “Showing off”, my Mother would have called it.    But  Whether it’s bar-room banter or High Opera I’m fishing with, the story has to have some sort of personal intrigue for you. That intrigue conceals a little delicious titbit of gossip. The gossip bait which you can’t resist. “Didn’t auntie Rose marry a man who made his fortune in jellyfish farming?”. You may know my Auntie Rose personally. You may be a fan of jellyfish, or a student of modern farming methods.  Or you may simply be amused by my visual imagery. One way of other I should have piqued your attention.

By the way, If you want one of the best hooks to begin a story, seek out and read “A Shocking Accident” by Graham Green.

Anyway, Using this bait to hook your attention, I can go on to strike a bargain with the you. “Let me be your guide and I will guarantee a funny, thought-provoking or emotional ending or some piece of salacious news about someone you know.” In essence, you are required to put aside your previous status and accept this lowly story-teller as a guide.  And for you to become a willing follower I must appear trustworthy and familiar despite my shabby appearance and unprepossessing demeanour. “Come with me.  I promise you the treasures of the orient.  The wonders of the galaxy.  A salacious titbit from a small back room not far from here.”

And if you rise to the bait and follow me on this journey I will keep your attention and interest by throwing out small breadcrumbs of familiarity as the story progresses;  these include little references and digressions which only You the listener can be clever enough to understand. “Oh, how clever you are,” I say with a wink “To understand that little aside. It’s a little secret between us.” These breadcrumbs are, in fact, artfully calculated to boost your self-esteem. They are there to build a rapport between us.  To hook you in to believing I am an entirely trustworthy fellow and it would do no harm to walk a few paces in my company. And like any pyramid selling scheme or con, the further you come with me, the less easy it is for you to break away without causing my disappointment and your losing face.  

And because you have now invested a considerable amount of time and attention, you can’t just step away.  And I now have the freedom to reveal some sort of hidden truth, be it a homily on the power of kings and tyrants.  Or useful information to slow up on the motorway because the police have a speed trap in place. Or beauty tips. Or advice not to break into bears’ cottages. 

By the way, stick me for a while and I’ll tell you a little local secret about Goldilocks.  I think you’ll find she’s not all she is made out to be.

My story is directed at you personally.  It is our journey.  Just you and me. But as an expert story teller, an assiduous flea picker, I can use this personal grooming to hold you even if you are one of a group. There may be hundreds or thousands in the audience  but I am gently persuading all of them to a vision that appears to be a mutual, one on one, face to face grooming session. We only have to consider the power of propaganda uttered by Goebbels or other unscrupulous politicians or follow the accounts of any of the myriad YouTube influencers, to see how this asymmetric interaction works. And it does work because these otherwise insignificant members of humanity groom us their audience with honeyed words and angry rants that coincide in some way with what we secretly think and believe.  The story teller knows, or appears to know, our very inward thoughts and fears.  Our unspoken distrust of foreigners or the dread of displaying your rolls of fat on the beach. And thus, their solutions and products are ravenously consumed.  And the more they feed us, the more familiar they become and the more we listen hungrily.

Incidentally, See also how I switch voices from whining supplicant to posing as the voice of experience and authority, sometimes appearing to be a knowing friend, always playing on your insecurities, all the more to catch you off guard by keeping the nature of our status fluid and me one step ahead.

Obviously, I wouldn’t want to deceive you in any way but Story telling seems to be something you want so, as long as I can persuade you of my credibility and consistent character as a story teller your expectations will be satisfied.  Won’t they?  But I suppose that means the question to ask is: “who exactly is this raggedy story-teller you have to give your trust to?” Perhaps I’ll reveal more in the next phase which is called “unreliable witness.”

Oh yes.  Goldilocks. I nearly forgot.  The secret of Goldilocks and the Three bears.  Actually there are three secrets.  The first is that, although, there are older stories with some similarities, the one that comes down to us is not a folk tale.  It was written by the poet Robert Southey and published in 1837.   The second hidden truth is that in this version the three bears are all bachelors; good-natured, trusting, harmless, tidy, and hospitable. And Goldilocks, to quote Wikipaedia: “is impudent, bad, foul-mouthed, ugly, dirty, and a vagrant deserving of a stint in the House of Correction”.  And the third hidden truth is Southey wrote in the village of Burton on the edge of the New Forest not ten miles from where I’m sitting now.  Burton has an annual bear festival in commemoration.