SHORT STORY — COMMUNICATION / PERSONALITY

Waiting for Glimpses: In Praise of the Round Robin.

Or, a brief musing on correspondence, preference, and posterity.

I really can’t understand why people get so het up about Round Robins. You know, those newsy updates enclosed in your Christmas cards from people you rarely see anymore. They’re typed, printed and folded in with the card, providing a little summary of that family’s past year. I open them with glee and get stuck straight in to the lives of others.

But my goodness, how the Round Robin riles some people.

People HATE them, don’t they?

I love them! Send me all of them. For a moment, I am INVESTED in which Uni your granddaughter is hoping to get into after that terrible glandular fever saga.

Gosh darn it, if I didn’t have attention deficit issues, I’d be writing my own Round Robin updates every year. Instead, people who know me can watch my Facebook feed over a year and get seasick trying to keep up with my mood swings and life seesaws.

Weirdly though, I value a Round Robin newsletter update over a photo album of your honeymoon on social media. Maybe that’s because it’s on paper. Like something from the olden days. How quaint! It has a feelgood factor, like we still have our feet on planet earth, and can still use pulped Actual Tree to share news.

I have a curious mind. For exciting stories and dull ones alike.

Just feed me story.

I will read the label on the HP sauce bottle every time it sits in front of me. Houses of Parliament sauce! Can you IMAGINE how excited I get by a Dr Bronner’s bottle, oh my. ALL THESE WORDS TO EAT UP.

I listen to conversations between people I don’t know and find some strange contentment in knowing that she’s chosen the blue lamp from Dunelm over the grey ones on Facebook marketplace. Like, I couldn’t care less, but the mundane gives me a strange thrill. It’s like ASMR. There’s a relaxing sensation, like perhaps the planet isn’t really home to a psychopathic species vandalising all its beauty, so long as Janet has found and enjoys her duck egg lamps. Everything feels simple and safe when you tune in to the minutia of other people’s existences.

So, why do people hate Round Robins with such venomous ire?

The reasons seem to include the following:

• Huh. Couldn’t be bothered to update us throughout the year. We haven’t heard a peep from them. Why should I be interested now?

Right, that’s quite interesting to me, because I have some training in Jungian personality traits and I am beginning to come up with an hypothesis that this may be about introversion and extraversion. Rather than being about shyness and confidence, introverted and extroverted preferences are about where we prefer to get our energy, the outside or inner world. Introverts need to recharge in their inner world, but can be quite gregarious when they’ve adequately recharged. Extroverts get their charge from engaging outwardly, and feel flat when left alone for too long.

So, if an extravert does all their updates live and direct on the daily, phoning their mum once a day, their daughter thrice a day, and chatting to all their colleagues, siblings, customers and friends all day long or has a good catch up with everyone at the weekend, they’re really not going to want or need to write a Round Robin, and wouldn’t place any value in receiving one.

Additionally, what they value may be what they spend the most time with (YEY!) so there is no value to them in being engaged briefly and rarely by a document of another’s life, when their own life is full of ready connection, just as they prefer it.

A couple of extroverts have separately said to me recently “I haven’t seen my best friend for two weeks, so we’re having a good catch up tonight.” WHAT? As an introvert, two weeks is a mere moment ago. TWO WEEKS. That’s just so soon! What more could I possibly bring after two weeks? And maybe that’s it. I value a deeply connective conversation that is probably exhausting but excitingly discursive and potentially life altering. Another person, maybe a Round Robin loather, might be perfectly content with lampshade-selecting discussions each day with their tribe, and yes, there’s always general daily detail to share if that’s your preferred communication style.

Detail and Big Picture are related to our personality archetypes too. Some of us more easily see detail (there are five petals on each of those pink flowers on that hill) whereas some of us more easily see big picture (woah, look at all of those pink flowers over there, what a splendour). That doesn’t mean we can’t then focus on the other. Big Picture person (‘Perceiving’ in MBTI terms) might then think, ooh let me count the petals, while detail person (‘Sensing’ in MBTI) might finish counting the petals and then zoom out to enjoy the wider scene. Both might need a prod to do so, but they can do it.

Back to frequency of interaction: I haven’t had a good catch-up with most of my best friends for months, even years. They are very forgiving and accept that keeping in touch with me means watching my scattergun Facebook posts and waiting six weeks for me to reply to their WhatsApp that I am okay yes thank you here’s some news, how are you, oh good. Catch up in six weeks then. Bye.

Maybe an introvert, who doesn’t need a daily chat with five different people (a fabulous means of keeping everyone appraised of your life in the moment, may I say, and probably the far healthier in terms of rapid problem solving, closer relationships, and staying rooted in the present) is more likely to enjoy a Round Robin, then, because it’s a low-cost energy demand, and really, last Christmas wasn’t all that long ago, who wants more communication than this?! 🤣

People also moan that:

• The update is all about how wonderful their family is, with Tabitha getting into Oxford, Rupert being promoted to head engineer at Dyson, and Granny and Grandad celebrating their platinum anniversary with a backpacking trip to Peru, and Molly having just published her first novel. It’s just grotesque self-congratulation.

Yeah, because we hate it when our friends become successful. Why wouldn’t we want to know about this? How wonderful to hear that our old friends are doing well. Especially at Christmas. Come on, a bit of peace love, and understanding in the name of Frosty the Snowman, PLEASE!

Another cause for spitting feathers people find in receiving Round Robins seems to be:

• It’s so impersonal, just no personal touch.

Well, nor is the opinion column in your mass-distribution tabloid, about some inane person’s life and attendant reflections. I bet Round Robin haters are lapping all that up.

Anyway, what? We should all write a newsy handwritten note in each Christmas card, providing a bespoke update to each recipient according to their relationship with the sender? Right, because everyone’s got time for that have they?

Oddly, the Round Robin moaners aren’t out there sending separately scrawled updates, are they? Nor are they giving much insight into their lives (inner or outer) on social media, so there’s no personal or impersonal touching going on at all for us peripheral people, waiting for glimpses. Neither what their philosophy and politics are, nor what lamps they’ve chosen, because yes, I know, they’re too busy doing this IN REAL LIFE to real people, in phone calls and over cups of tea, or at the school gates. Which is great. But where’s the document for posterity?

Because that’s the main bit for me. Not that I’M saving all these newsletters in a box in my attic for a future archivist to be fascinated by, but hopefully some people are, and honestly, the past IS fascinating. Especially for those of us who place value on stories, human stories. And maybe those for whom the present is proving to be a little uncomfortable.

I mean, if I consume content so voraciously that an HP bottle grabs me one minute and a Greek myth consumes me the very next, then surely I’ll be giddy with excitement reading about my old next door neighbour Gloria’s rehearsals for Rock Nativity.

Round Robins are human stories. They are valuable artefacts.

What village primary school little Breda got into now her own village school has closed, how Thandie is doing on her year building schools in Malawi (and here’s her GoFundMe link) and what Grandad Silverman got up to at that ill-fated golf tournament, WILL be of interest to future social historians piecing together the lives of our contemporaries (and their institutions) to create a picture of those generations we cross over with on our short time on earth. There’s very little such physical material being generated in modern life, and cyber archaeology is going to be a serious nightmare to catalogue. So those people sitting down at their laptops summarising their family’s lives in amusing little newsletters are doing a favour for the future. Just as historically, people who kept diaries and wrote letters, or business owners who kept purchasing records (which sounds dull until you dig in!) have given our national and international heritage a gift, something for us to pore over when we visit a small-town museum, and something for academics to stitch together into the big story of us, so do our Round Robiners contribute to such a document in our time.

We can’t possibly know what will be important to future history tourists, and it is arrogant to dismiss the news our cousins and old friends send us as irrelevant, boastful, and timewasting.

So, I am all in favour of being sent a printed newsletter. I want more of them. A little glimpse into the lives of people I have cared for once and still do, from a distance. A little connection. A little moment of story. An illustration of a life. A tiny foray for the reader into their own inner world, rather than a constant extroverting of self in one’s own realm: what does this person’s life actually tell me about mine?

We should, I think, take the time to enjoy the news our more distant acquaintances share with us. That they included us at all is a sign of love, and a moment of connection in a fractured world.

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