“I’m definitely going to lie to my children about my inheritance,” I overhear a thirtysomething finance bro in designer sunglasses say while sitting on the grass in St James’s Square one hot, bright lunchtime in early July. Later that night, just after 11pm on Charing Cross Road, I listen as a homeless man with a face of tattoos turns to his friend and asks, “Have you got 10 pence, mate? I’ve been out three hours . . . someone gave me a loaf of bread, mate, f*** that.”
I suppose technically I didn’t “overhear” anything. There was nothing accidental about how I’d spent that day: I walked 36,512 steps across London, deliberately listening in on people’s conversations, and diligently scribbling down what I discovered. Over the course of those 15 hours, I filled 34 pages in a notebook and sent myself 61 emails (because typing is more inconspicuous than pulling out a pencil). Is eavesdropping like that unethical? Yes, and in certain circumstances it can even be illegal.
But I was inspired by the long-dead New York eccentric Joe Gould. Between the 1910s and the 1940s, he listened to more than 20,000 everyday conversations and began compiling them into the longest book ever written, An Oral History of the Contemporary World. At least, that’s what Gould claimed. For 60 years, debate has raged about whether or not his book did exist — but regardless, I’ve always thought the idea was sound. Gould believed that meaning could be found in “lyrical episodes of everyday life”. He was motivated by a line from the poet WB Yeats: “The history of a nation is not in parliaments and battlefields, but in what the people say to each other on fair days and high days.”