12 | MAKING CONNECTIONS | OPINION


ONLY CONNECT? Making connections is all important, but so too is knowing when to make them, says Hilary Moriarty I


was a sucker for the very idea of “Only connect” when I first came across it in E. M. Forster’s ‘Howard’s End’. I


was an undergrad studying English at Trinity College Dublin and I thought the instruction magical. Profound. Yes! The answer – though to quite what question I am not sure I knew even then. But it was so quotable, usually in deeply mysterious tones brooking no argument. And so thrilling when you did, and someone recognised it – “Ah Forster!” they would say. “So true!” And you felt as if you had found a kindred spirit in a hostile world. You shared a moment,


felt superior for a second – in fact, what you did was connect. Go, Forster. The irony is that, in the late 60s, to leave


university was to become immediately disconnected from many of the friends you had made: they went to the Forces and got sent far away; they joined VSO and went to South America for a year, but then never came back; they even scatered in the British mainland, but who was great at leter-writing then? And groty flats may have had no phones and flights cost the earth. Ours is the generation that reconnected via Friends Reunited and Facebook, but there was much dislocation


and disconnection in between. The trouble is that when everyone


was enabled to adopt our literary mantra, “Only connect”, in a later age, see where it got us. Last month I atended a conference


with a fine array of speakers. Eight years in a job in which organising five or six conferences a year was part of what I did has taught me a lot about speakers. Like a good man, a good speaker is hard to find, and his price can come close to diamonds. I actually atended many conferences for which I was not responsible just to find speakers for the ones I did – experience


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