By Arnold Jansen op de Haar

This week I read about psychological research which proved that three-quarters of our conversations consist of gossip. Other researchers concluded it was more likely to be fourteen per cent. Social psychology isn’t science, it’s a rather sophisticated form of astrology.

The researchers involved in the first gossip study classified mere talking about others as gossip, whereas the fourteen per cent report restricted this to bad-mouthing.

I know very few people who don’t gossip. Well, there’s my father, but he has been dead for fifteen years. It was only recently I found out that his behaviour was quite unusual.

Let me come clean: I haven’t inherited this trait. I regularly gossip to my heart’s content. I simply tell the truth. I would like to make it clear that the persons mentioned in this column are disguised. They will recognise themselves but I’ve altered a few details. Actually it’s much worse.

For example, I know someone who simulates being ill. At first you think: oh dear, it’s terrible that he’s ill, but twenty years on this feeling has faded. I remember once pushing his wheelchair along the hospital corridors. At every doorstep he yelled ‘ouch, ouch, ouch’ and clutched his stomach. At one point his wife was in tears in the kitchen. ‘He’s dying,’ she sobbed. ‘I think he will live to a grand old age,’ I murmured. After twenty-three medical examinations he was indeed given the all clear.

Later he maintained he had once harboured a rare viral infection in his brain. This continues to cause a range of obscure complications which make it quite impossible for him to go to work. At present he is an insomniac. Obviously, he’s too busy thinking about all his illnesses.

It could also have been caused by a ski accident he had four years ago. You occasionally hear about a professional cyclist who has to be cut free from barbed wire, a total wreck. ‘He cycled on for another hundred kilometres with a piece of barbed wire in his thigh, only to be taken away by ambulance. At the hospital they diagnosed a crushed spleen and three broken ribs.’ Six months later the cyclist is as fit as a fiddle.

Unlike our character, who ‘because of his back’ can no longer travel by train. He has to travel by car. Am I the only one who thinks that driving a car is bad for your back? In a train you can at least change position.

Recently he picked up a pan and his entire family spoke as one: ‘Papa, think of your back!’ At weekends this bungler acts as a football referee! He makes it sound all quite plausible, but every time it reminds me of the ouch, ouch, ouch threshold.

I regularly discuss this with my best friend. I wouldn’t call it gossiping. It’s all absolutely true. The best approach would probably be to inquire how the patient feels and listen to the stories, but this is the threshold I cannot cross, what I call my ouch, ouch, ouch threshold.

I’m not always good at keeping secrets. I remember meeting a woman when I was in the pub with my friend. I knew her slightly and she was a well-known figure in my home town. She told me all the ins and outs of her troublesome relationship with her husband. She came very close; she smelled of wine.

That same night she apparently felt rueful and sent me six increasingly hysterical emails, urging me not to pass on any information. Of course I pass it on, especially after receiving those six hysterical emails. Only to a few very good friends. If you don’t want to broadcast a secret, don’t tell it to the first person you meet in a pub.

I haven’t even mentioned the well-known writer who emailed a friend with something awful about another writer. By accident he sent the email to all his friends, including the other writer.

Isn’t it rather odd to realise that during the time it took me to write this column and you to read it, we’ve been gossiped about at least three times?

© Arnold Jansen op de Haar
© Translation Holland Park Press