Why men share trivia

It was halfway through lunch that something reminded my friend Marcus about Ray Charles and his plane. ‘Did you know he used to fly it himself?’ he asked the rest of us. ‘When it reached cruising altitude he’d insist on taking the controls. Obviously his passengers were terrified. They thought a blind man playing chess was one thing, but flying a plane? Someone asked him once why he did it. He said: “Because it’s mine.”’

This triggered a memory of my own. ‘It was the same with his car,’ I said. ‘One day he insisted on driving it. When his chauffeur tried to stop him, Charles said “Who paid for the car?” They were at an intersection. Charles ploughed straight into another car.’

At this point Susie, who has known Marcus and me for ages, leaned across to Ciara, who’d only just met us. ‘You’ll get used to this with these two,’ she said. ‘Competitive fact-swapping.’

But Susie was wrong. It isn’t competitiveness that makes Marcus and me swap facts — it’s enthusiasm. We remember something interesting, we want to share it. And tangents working as they do, the conversations sometimes go on for a while. We don’t plan them like this; it just happens. We both experience the joy of learning new things, of being educated and amused by the contents of someone else’s brain.

In fact it’s the opposite of competitive. Neither of us wants to ‘win’, in the sense of coming out with a fact that stops the other person replying. Because that would mean an end to our entertainment. We want the conversation to keep going forever, an infinite tennis rally of facts. Most of my male friends are the same. And Susie wasn’t the first woman to misunderstand us.