'What's new?'

Now that is a question to strike minor terror in my heart. It is a common, seemingly inoffensive way to open a conversation. One of my friends will begin every telephone conversation with that question even if our previous conversation was only a day or two earlier. So why does my heart sink when I'm asked it?

I put my reaction down to my upbringing. Mine was a solitary upbringing. I was an only child. No siblings. My only two cousins arrived on this planet years after I did and so there was no childhood connection there. My parents, struggling to establish themselves financially, both worked full time in part to finance the very expensive private school in which they had placed me. They could not afford to repay the invitations that other parents made for me to spend time with their children. As a result those invitations, few in number anyway, dried up after a while.

Apart from school time, mostly spent regimented and disciplined in the classroom, I spent very little social time with anyone remotely similar in age to me. I never really learnt the skill of playful, casual chit chat.

So, nowadays when someone asks me, 'what's new?' I am in a dilemma. OK, if it happens that I have just purchased a new apartment or I have just returned from an overseas holiday or I have just been diagnosed with a terminal condition then I do have something new to report. But what about those long strings of weeks, week after week after week, when none of those things nor nothing remotely similar has occurred? What do I say then?

Perhaps I could model myself on another friend whose every telephone conversation includes a detailed run down of what he has done that day. He doesn't even require me to ask the question. In that event, my every (weekday) response to the question would be as follows. I got up and I shaved and showered and dressed. I ate two Weet-bix and some prunes for breakfast, drank orange juice and took my daily medication and then I drove to work etc, etc, etc.

In effect; everything old, is new again.