sundays, small talk with strangers, and a very cute cardigan

notes on last sunday :)

On Sunday, I woke up and decided that I wanted to spend the morning with myself, which I have not done for a long while. Last year, when I lived alone in a studio flat comparable to the size of one of those drive-through-only coffee shops situated in the middle of random suburban-American parking lots, my days were mainly spent talking to no one but me, myself, and I, and the occasional emotional support baristas and the nice man who worked at the post office. I also worked as a freelancer and would oftentimes go an entire day without saying anything out loud beyond, “Hi! Can I have an iced latte with oat milk please?” or “Two international stamps to send a letter to America please,” (which, by the way, £2.50 for a single international stamp should be illegal) and between the six months spent in and out of my drive-through-coffee-shop I learned that I actually, really, truly enjoy the presence of my own company. After eventually moving in with three flatmates, and now living with just my partner, Nielsan, things are different now, and have been different for the last 11 months. Nielsan and I have (and enjoy) alone time, together — what the psychologists call ‘parallel play’ and what us young folk like to call ‘enclosure time’ — but on Sunday we woke up and mutually agreed that we should part ways for the afternoon. Nielsan was keen (I’m sorry, I’ve lived in the UK for 3 years and while I do not yet have an accent I do un-ironically say words like ‘keen’) to go to the garden and hardware shops and buy some soil and plants and some shelves and screws for our plant-less and shelf-less abode, and I had three equally as important things on my to-do list, albeit not for the greater good of making our home feel like a home, but more-so the greater good of — again, as us young folk like to say — my self-fulfilment, psychological, and basic needs:

1. The Cute Frilly Grey Cardigan I Saw On Instagram (from this very specific pop-up shop in East London)

2. Flowers (for both myself and my friends that were coming over later in the evening)

3. Iced coffee (and a pastry - but anyone who knows me knows this goes without saying)

tum’s hierarchy of needs

I decided to tick the Very Important things off my to do list in sequential order, and so, we begin this section of the post with The Cardigan (sorry Swifties, not the cardigan you think it is.)

A brand that I absolutely adore called Good Squish was having a pop-up shop here in London, and Sunday was the last day, and I had already been procrastinating going since opening night but something in my gut — as well as the e-mail reminder at 10:00 AM — told me that I should go to it, and so I got out of bed, put on my plaid skirt, my fluffy GS scrunchie, my docs and my tote bag, and headed to London’s mecca of Instagram-bars and vintage shopping otherwise known as: Shoreditch. (Despite the ball pit bar and Boxpark and the phone snatchers outside of Shoreditch High Street station, we still love her. Or at least I do.) On my walk from the bus stop to the shop, I passed by a bakery that makes *the* best focaccia sandwiches I’d often eat on my self-assigned freelance lunch breaks, a coffee shop that I went on a first date at, where I thought things were going well and then he said he wanted to see me again and then proceeded to ghost and block me on all platforms (where I then learned you probably shouldn’t talk to someone for 4 months before going on a first date and also that if someone blocks you on WhatsApp their profile picture disappears), and a bookshop that stocked a few of my zines last year but have yet to pay out my invoice of 50 Great British Pounds. For better or for worse, Bethnal Green Road holds a memorable place in my heart, and it probably always will.

goodsquish

A post shared by @goodsquish

The pop-up shop greeted me with everything I love about the brand: lace and frills and stripes and the color pink and hair clips and ribbons and femininity and messy handwriting and childlike wonder and everything else that is good in this world. The girl working — dressed in a red cardigan from the collection — greeted me, I smiled back, and then did that thing where you walk through a shop and pretend like you’re looking at everything on display even though you came for a very specific grey cardigan but someone else was in the cardigan section so you try and time your pace with the timing of their browsing and hope that you can make a clean sweep when the section is open. (Or maybe it’s just me…. having anxiety is Super Cool.) I grabbed a cardigan, she was as wonderful as I could have ever imagined, and I asked the Good Squish Girlie if it was a one size fits all situation. Yes, it is, she said. I said thank you, no worries, knowing that regardless of sizing I probably would end up purchasing, and then she followed up with words I could not have anticipated: By the way, I think I follow you on Substack! Are you Paddingtum?

I never in a million years thought that someone would recognise me from this silly little platform, where I — firstly and fore-mostly — do not consider myself someone to be worthy of IRL recognition, ever, and secondly, write 15+ minute long articles that I never anticipate people to actually finish (let alone start), ever, [I’ve seen the click rate for these posts… the 58% of you who choose to read this far, thank you, I appreciate you]. When I get at least 2 likes (one of which is usually from my mom, hi mom) and the occasional comment or re-stack, I am absolutely stoked.

Anyways, I was like, What?!, and then she told me she recently started a Substack of her own, and then we talked about Good Squish and social media, and then it occurred to me that I think she commented on my post a few weeks ago (about community) and I had replied back, which she then confirmed did, indeed, happen and *then* we talked about one of my favorite things to think about: small talk and strangers, and how rewarding it can feel to be seen and acknowledged by the not-so-random people around you. As a born and bred Londoner, she has observed a shift within the last 10 years — unfortunately, people are a lot less keen on small talk as they used to be. She also told me that she has become a regular at the coffee shop next door, and it made me happy that other people find joy in having their orders remembered.

I told her we should hang out sometime, and Mo, if you’re reading this - let’s get a coffee?

I wound up buying the cardigan, because how could I not, and then I left the pop-up shop feeling very happy having made a new friend and a new purchase, the fuel a Tatum needs to continue a Sunday morning alone. I returned to the aforementioned coffee shop as a means of reclaiming a first date gone semi-wrong, treated myself to an iced latte with oat milk, and while I waited for my Basic Need Of The Day That For Some Reason Cost £4.20 I sent my friend Maddie an eager voice note to tell her what happened, and she responded with perhaps the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me:

this is literally the best compliment i have ever received <3 ily maddie <3

As I sipped the expensive nectar of the Holy Shot Gods and made my way to the flower market, I was thinking about what Maddie said; how I seem to be the only person who can make friends in the wild. For someone who recites their restaurant order over and over again in their head and most times still manages to stutter, I strangely wind up striking up conversations with people out and about and I think it is perhaps the most enigmatic thing about me. (When I was 16 I worked at an ice-cream shop and somehow wound up working on register during the hot summer rushes. My manager, who, looking back on it, was kind of a weirdo himself, told me I have a “weird confidence” where I’m kind of awkward, but I know how to engage with customers, and while I do not love being described as ‘weird’ or ‘awkward,’ I understand what he meant and I do think it rings true to this day.) I have always liked to write because I do not always like to speak but when I do speak I usually end up feeling very fulfilled after. Crazy how that works.

For what feels like months now, I’ve been wanting to write a Substack piece about small talk and strangers and the irony of big cities often failing to foster a sense of community and how we should all be a little kinder to one another but I couldn’t quite ever get it right. Like Charli Xcx recently said, I think about it all the time. And really, I do. I have about three drafts in here about the topic, but they all steer in the direction of citing psychology articles about how London is one of the loneliest and most anxious cities in the UK, and studies on how small talk is actually good for you, or just straight up paraphrasing this book I have been reading since my second date with Nielsan (which was in July of 2022), and while I love myself an academically researched and reviewed paper, I do not want my writing on here to feel like one. I want it to feel like an open diary, or like a FaceTime call with a familiar friend, or like a Notes app vent, where I can spew my thoughts and feelings and my run on sentences and you can (hopefully) read and listen and get something out of it. If there’s one takeaway here, it is to talk to strangers, despite what your parents might have taught you as a child. It is also that unfriendliness has, in fact, penetrated the vibe.

a comment on a youtube video i watched called “people don’t have friends anymore. why?” (highly recommend)

I am aware of the Boomer implications when I say this, but we are living in a digital, disconnected age where we opt out of any ounce of tangible togetherness. We choose self-checkout over a register with a clerk and ask food delivery drivers to leave the takeout outside the door, and we avoid eye contact on public transportation, instead choosing our online worlds, or our books, or our headphones. By placing our headphones over our ears, or going to self-checkout, we are signalling that we do not wish to be spoken to. (I understand the convenience of self-checkout, and trust me, sometimes I just want to listen to Clairo in peace too, but hopefully you can understand what I’m trying to say.) When I booked an appointment to get my eyebrows done, there was literally an option to ask your aesthetician to not speak to you. I saw a Tik Tok where a person gives advice on how to avoid small talk, and the hundreds of thousands of likes and comments genuinely made me so sad for humanity, because it takes at least two people to make most things happen, and it is so, deeply upsetting that we are going to lengths as great as giving others tips and tricks on how to avoid connecting with one another.

I met one of my good friends, Tara, through Tik Tok, because she commented on a video of mine and I asked her if she wanted to hang out because she seemed really cool (can confirm, she is!). I became friends with Sam, who works in the same building as me, because one time I sat on the train and he was on the seat next to me and we realized that we take the same hour long commute to the office every day, and then my subsequent commutes became a lot less lonely. I met Nielsan because I decided to reply to his message, and currently I am writing an article as he re-pots our plants. I got my job of making magazines for my dream music blog because I cold emailed them pitching myself, and then I pitched the idea of creating a magazine to them, and now I am working on the 6th edition. I have a track record of receiving coffee and pastries on the house because I have a tendency to become besties with the people who work at the coffee shops around me. My mom (who is from The Philippines) met my dad (who is from Holland) because she said hi to him at a bar (in San Francisco). I’m telling you — a little bit of small talk goes a long way. Even if it is as simple as “hello.”

my parents : )

… that being said, I cannot overstate just how gratifying my interaction with Mo left me feeling. I am convinced that I was meant to go to that pop-up shop, at that specific time, to be reminded that there actually is a lot of kindness in this sometimes-isolating city. The fact that we had previously interacted with one another a few weeks ago through a Substack comments section, and now we were in a shop admiring a brand we both adore, blows my mind in a way that I cannot fully explain. How many other people have I connected with, without knowing it? How many meaningful connections would we form if we let someone sit next to us on the bus, or honestly told the person at the register how our day was going, or complimented someone’s outfit out loud instead of in our head? I like to think that the universe rewards me with a gift every day, and on that day, it was a new connection.

I thought about all of the above and more as I approached the flower market. If you live in London, you know the one I’m talking about. The Flower Market is not for the faint of heart: what seems like a wholesome Sunday activity is actually like going to the bar on a Friday night and fighting for the bartender’s attention, only instead of drunkenly asking for a G&T you are asking for a bunch of sunflowers or a massive house plant. This flower market in particular is always crowded with Sambas and Salomons, and there are usually people yelling “LAVENDER FOR A FIVER, LAVENDER FOR A FIVER! GET YOUR LAVENDER HERE!” and sometimes most times those people are shirtless and sweaty and sunburnt and 63 years old and you can choose to hate it or love it, and personally, I choose to love it. There is nothing better than seeing people walk around the streets of East London carrying plants taller than themselves, bouquets of massive hydrangeas, and the colors of summer wrapped in dark brown paper, tied together with a bow. It is one of those sights that reminds us that we are humans, and sometimes, we can be cute. Amongst the chaos, I secured three bunches: daisies, wildflowers, and orange thistles.

At this point, I had completed all of my missions except one, arguably the most important: a sweet treat. Despite how much money I did not and do not want to spend for the foreseeable future due to this expensive morning of buying things, I decided to walk to one of my favorite bakeries, passing by my old studio flat and being reminded of the times spent talking to myself and having a refrigerator at the foot of my bed, and then wound up around the corner and bought a slice of carrot cake for myself and a cardamom bun for Nielsan.

Then, I walked home with my hands fuller than ever, wondering if anyone would see me and feel the same way that I feel when I see someone walking with a big bouquet of flowers. A human being a human.

Then, I got home, gave Nielsan his pastry, tried on my cardigan, put the flowers in their respective vases, grabbed a fork and my carrot cake, and immediately got to writing about my very successful Sunday.

P.S. for anyone interested in consuming content about strangers, I love:

• We’re Not Really Strangers (the game and the IG account)

• The Power of Strangers by Joe Keohane

• Thoraya Maronesy on YouTube

• A zine I made, The Penpal Project

• Podcast But Outside