Taxi Exceptions to the Denial Rule – the Role of Mirrors

In return, English taxi drivers are generally courteous towards their customers – and often positively friendly, to the extent of breaking the normal �denial’ rules of privacy and reserve. There is a sort of standing joke among the English about the excessive chattiness of taxi drivers and, indeed, many live up to their garrulous reputation. The main popular stereotype is of the would-be-tabloid-columnist cabbie, who bores or infuriates his passengers with endless heated monologues on everything from the inadequacies of the current Government or the England football coach to the latest celebrity-gossip scandal. I have come across drivers of this type and, like most English passengers, I tend to be too embarrassed either to ask them to shut up or to argue with their more objectionable opinions. We grumble about taxi drivers’ breach of the denial rule, but in typically English fashion we make a national joke out of it rather than actually tackling them directly.

There is also, however, another type of chatty cabbie, who does not deliver tabloid monologues but rather attempts to engage his passengers in friendly conversation – usually beginning, in accordance with English protocol, with a comment on the weather, but then breaking with tradition by expressing interest in the passengers’ destination and the purpose of their journey (a train station, for example, often prompts the question: �are you off somewhere nice, then?’). The questions can become more personal (or at least what the English regard as personal – such as enquiries about one’s job or family), but most such drivers are remarkably sensitive to nuances of tone and body language, and will not persist if the passenger comes over all English and gives monosyllabic answers or looks squirmy and uncomfortable. Many English people do find these enquiries intrusive, but we are nearly all too polite, or too embarrassed, to tell the cabbie to mind his own business – so these signals are all he has to go on.

There is also an element of �cultural remission’ in conversations with taxi drivers – and with certain other professionals such as hairdressers – whereby the normal rules of reticence and discretion are temporarily suspended, and one can, if one wishes, indulge in much more personal and intimate chat than is usually permitted between strangers. Doctors might well wish that the same suspension of cultural privacy rules applied in their consulting rooms and surgeries, where the English tend to be their usual inhibited, embarrassed selves. I can only suggest that they try speaking to their patients �through a mirror’, either by standing behind them like a hairdresser, or by rigging up a rear-view mirror like a taxi driver, as it seems to be at least partly the lack of direct face-to-face eye contact that allows the English to shed their inhibitions in these contexts.

This may to some extent be one of those �human universals’ – Catholic priests of all nationalities have long been aware of the effectiveness of the screen in promoting greater openness in confessions, and psychoanalysts’ use of the couch to avoid eye contact with their patients cannot be a coincidence, but as usual we are probably talking about a question of degree here, and it seems that the English find it particularly difficult to �open up’ in the absence of such tricks, and are particularly susceptible to the illusion of anonymity that they provide. In fact, if you think about it, my advice to English doctors goes against all the touchy-feely �communication skills’ training they now receive, in which they are told to sit close to the patient, not use their desk as a shield, lean forward, make eye contact, etc.: all measures that seem to me calculated to make the average English person clam up entirely. Which, according to doctors I asked about this, is precisely their effect on most English patients, who do not confess to the doctor what is really bothering them until they are on their way out of the consulting room, usually with their back half turned and their hand on the door-knob.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-06