I met this girl the other night. We sat on a sofa at a crowded party and she told me about her life adventures, about her too-handsome brother, about her parents' ongoing love story and about her weakness for large, funny men. She had jet earrings, laddered tights and a broken shoe - from dancing on too many tables. Sometimes you just want to listen. I could have listened to her all night writes Roisin Ingle.
Her life was very different to mine. She grew up on a sprawling farm in the country. As soon as she was old enough, she travelled the world. Her parents were wealthy enough to be able to make her a deal that they would always buy her a plane ticket to wherever she wanted to go to, as long as she supported herself while in her destination of choice. Now she is a free spirit, training to be a criminal lawyer. Representing baddies, I asked her? Alleged baddies, she corrected, sipping her beer and slipping out of her broken shoe.
Stop me if I'm boring you, she said, but she wasn't. Sometimes you get a window on a world and you are entranced. I love encounters like these.
I asked for her number. I might meet her again. I might not. I didn't get the number of the young man driving a taxi who drove me from Derry to Belfast a few years ago. I'd been at a Bryan Adams concert and he picked me up as I passed him on the street. He was this beautiful man in his early twenties with hair the colour of butter and a killer smile. He didn't look like any Derry boy I'd ever seen. We were only a few minutes into the journey when I had to ask: "What's a drop-dead gorgeous boy like you doing in a place like this?" or something a little less gushing and, hopefully, more diplomatic. All the way to Belfast, he told me exactly what.
As a teenager his mother had fallen in love with a US soldier who was stationed in the city. My taxi driver was the result of this union. The soldier returned to America and now has a wife and another grown-up family, but he knows about his Derry son. The taxi driver travelled to America to meet him. "He looks like me, I look like him," he said. He could have lived there, but stayed in Derry because by then he had met his girlfriend, who was now his wife. He had recently proposed. Took her up to the ruins of a castle on the outskirts of Derry where he laid a table with champagne and strawberries. He asked her to marry him as the sun set. "Just like in the movies," I asked him, impressed. "Just like in the movies," he agreed.
I met a man in Dublin over Christmas who was driving another taxi. I started talking to him about presents and shopping and lists of things to do and he stopped me to say: "The good is gone out of Christmas for me now." I asked him why, and he told me about his wife, who died a few years ago from cancer. He had two teenage daughters and he did his best for them, but it wasn't the same. Did I understand, he wanted to know. I sat talking with him after the meter stopped, as the lights twinkled all around us.
We all have stories worth hearing and even though we have less time these days, it seems more important than ever to listen. The person on the bus beside you. The binman who takes your rubbish. The lawyer in the pinstripe suit. Sometimes the stories will make you laugh. Sometimes they will make you sad.
When I went to London late last year to talk to some of the Irish emigrants who live alone, starved of company, I heard story after story of bravery, stoicism, kindness, loss and love. There was one woman, Kathleen, who couldn't walk, and spent all day praying that she would be given back the use of her legs. I had been introduced to her as a journalist, but she asked me to do a bit of washing-up and write a letter for her and by the end of the afternoon she had got it into her head that I would be coming back. That I was some kind of home help. Wouldn't it be great if you could come back and talk to me, she said hopefully, when I told her I lived in Dublin. Wouldn't it be great if you could come back and listen to me, is what I think she meant.
When I wrote about Kathleen and others in similar situations I got letter after letter, e-mail after e-mail, empathising with their plight. Correspondence from people making generous cash donations and offering to write to the people in the article. I sent all the letters on and I know that when the letters are received, then for that moment these forgotten people will feel really heard. At some level, that's all some of us really need. Our good times acknowledged. Our heartbreaks acknowledged. Our voices acknowledged. To the woman in her eighties living alone in Bayside, Dublin sending a letter and a €20 note to a woman in her seventies living alone in West Hampstead, London - thank you.