Hello Quack Readers! Thank you for continuing to support my writing by reading the blog. I have a few deadlines coming up, and so for now, The Quack will be coming out once a fortnight until life gets a little less crazy. On the plus side, I have some exciting novel news, which I will announce very soon. MN x
AUDIO QUACK. SKIP INTRODUCTON 2:01
At the start of Lent, I challenged myself to give 40 compliments to strangers over the 40 days. I called it Mission: A Compliment. Read it here.
I thought it was going to be easy. I would walk around the streets, spreading compliments like free sweets, and the world would be a better place. Maybe I’d make the news. Mystery woman makes it her mission to compliment a stranger every day.
So off I went on my mission, with my big positive opinions ready to be shared…. 3 days into the challenge, I realised I wasn’t the dazzling compliment giver I originally thought I was.
It took me 10 days to find my first candidate. She was in my hot yoga class and wore leggings with cartoon ducks on them. As I planked, the sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes, making her ducks look like they were paddling in the rain. I thought this was very funny, so I made a beeline for her in the changing room, walking past all the women peeling off their sweaty clothes.
“I like your ducks,” I said, dripping in sweat.
“Oh!” she said, sweating too. “Thank you. That’s why I bought them.”
And I went. “Ha. Very cool.” And as I left the changing room, a small noise went off in my head, the kind you hear when you get a point in an arcade game: your first compliment. 39 to go.
I had broken the ice, so it seemed to be a little easier. I wasn’t very good with adjectives; I more just told people I liked what I saw.
“I like your knitted cardigan,” I told a barista. The lady’s leopard print wrap skirt got the same treatment. I liked the woman’s red-framed glasses. I told the hairdresser that I liked her makeup. An orange patterned headscarf worn by a bartender was also liked.
It dawned on me that I was being too appearance-heavy with my compliments. There isn’t much else you can work with a stranger, but I tried to branch out to behavior and skills:
I told a Pilates instructor that her class was great. Ding.
One day I was quietly reading my book in a café when a mum and her toddler came along. He picked up a pool cue and was walking around with it like he was Moses. I told his mother that her kid was adorable. Ding.
The boy came over, still holding the pool cue, and stood in front of me. I put down my book to see he was holding a drawing of a dinosaur. I told him it was a very good dinosaur, and then I lifted my book back up again. Ding.
It was a good roll, but it wasn’t enough. By April, I could still count on my hands the number of compliments I had given out. Every day I would wake up and say, “Right, I must compliment someone today,” and some days I did, but often I found myself on my pink sofa in the evening, staring up at the ceiling, hoping people didn’t notice the blog post titled HOW TO COMPLIMENT A STRANGER. But that hope was dashed when I received a message from a guy saying he really liked my post about complimenting strangers. Ah, bollocks.
There seemed to be a few reasons why I was struggling. For starters, I was very adamant that it had to be genuine. It’s pretty suspect when you’re complimenting someone for the sake of it. (Even if that sake is to win the challenge you have set yourself on your blog. #MillennialProblems).
“I like your bag for life.”
“You suit your bin bag poncho.”
“Nice black socks.”
That’s not to say everyone I met wasn’t worthy of a compliment, but some days nothing was shouting out at me like ducks on yoga leggings.
Another issue was that I overthought the interaction. This could be due to my generation or the fact that I’m British, but whatever it was, before I had even approached someone, I visualised how it could go wrong.
I was in Sainsbury’s when I spotted a woman, around my age, inspecting the gluten-free range. She had a beaten-up leather backpack that looked very cool, so I tottered towards her to tell her this. But as I got closer, I saw she had earbuds in, so I turned around. Abort mission. It’s a golden rule that when someone is wearing earbuds, they should only be disturbed if absolutely necessary, like they’ve dropped something or the fire alarm is going off. My compliment didn’t feel vital enough.
This is how it would have gone:
I would have stood to the side of her and said, “I like your backpack.” She wouldn’t have heard me, so I would say it louder: “I LIKE YOUR BACKPACK!”
She would finally notice the random woman speaking to her and scoop out an earbud in a panic.
“Sorry?”
“I just wanted to say that I liked your backpack…”
Thank you,” she would say, with a forced light smile, as to not offend me in case I was a nutter, because who in their right mind would make someone scoop out their earbuds and disturb The Rest is History podcast, to compliment a bag. (I assume it would be a podcast like The Rest is History, because we were in Oxford and she seemed the type).
So, yeah. That’s why I didn’t compliment that person, and many others.
Easter weekend came, I got off the train at Penzance carrying an M&M Easter egg for Mum’s boyfriend and my own failure. Mission: a compliment had been a bust. In 40 days, I had given out… don’t laugh… 12 compliments. 12/40. The last time I saw a score like that was on my math tests… which is why I’m not going to make that score into a percentage. The only way I was going to make the news now is by playing the anti-hero. The mystery woman is too uptight to compliment the public.
What I have taken from the last 40 days is that I like novelty clothing and that, while I’ve become very good at liking videos posted by a stranger from the other side of the world, I have become rusty in interacting with the real people around me, and this is going to need a little more practice. Mission A Compliment continues…
THE QUACK 