In New York recently I had to make small talk with a stranger. Americans make small talk differently to South Africans; they're more comfortable talking about themselves. "So," she said, having caught me up with her university years and early work experiences and her professional expectations for the immediate future. "Tell me about yourself.""Um," I said. "There's not really much to tell."She looked at me with pity and light disdain."There must be something," she said. "Work?"I shrugged."Do you have any hobbies?"And that brought me up short, because I suddenly realised I don't. How can that be? I've always thought of myself as a chap with varied interests and secret passions and nooks of private expertise, the kind of fellow who could make good use of a garden shed or a basement lair and might at any moment be found husbanding bees or building a working scale model of the Apollo 11 landing module. Do I really have no other interests? Is my inner life so utterly blank? Shouldn't I be more like Karl?I met Karl this week on Marianne Thamm and Jayne Morgan's splendid new podcast First Person, in which La Thamm talks to ordinary people with interesting lives. Karl is a sweet, warm, lovely man who lives in Woodstock and keeps pigeons. Wait, that is underselling the situation. No dream has ever been dreamed nor man ever loved the way Karl loves his pigeons. Once you've heard Karl adoringly describe the ideal shape and colour of the perfect pigeon droppings, you're apt to look at the people in your own life and think: "Why doesn't anyone talk that way about me?"But the problem is that as good with pigeons as Karl may be, he's not married to them, he's married to his wife, Amina, and the real drama of the episode is Karl's attempts to wrestle himself back from the Technicolor dream-flights of his pigeon loft and into the unfeathered monochrome of real life. When Karl climbs those steps he's like Dorothy leaving Kansas for the candy-coloured streets of Oz, or he's like a smack addict - he's trying to cling to his life and the people who love him, but each time he climbs the stairs he leaves them a little further behind.I envy Karl that extra dimension to his life, that current running through his daily existence, but he reminds me a little of Mr Kalkin who lived on my road when I was a kid.Mr Kalkin was building a boat in his yard. It was a metal boat, and he'd made some progress on the empty hull, up on blocks like some redneck's Datsun, but at some point progress had stalled and it was slowly rusting an autumnal ochre, as though it was just one big Plimsoll line. But Mr Kalkin hadn't abandoned it. Each evening we'd see him sitting on the bow with a scraper or a welding rod, puffing at a Chesterfield plain, making his boat an extra micrometre more seaworthy. Sometimes we'd hear Mrs Kalkin calling him for dinner. Sometimes I saw his teenaged son go out in a car with friends and not bother to say goodbye. Sometimes when I was going to bed and drawing my curtains I could see Mr Kalkin still sitting up there on his boat on blocks, just sitting and sitting.My dad never much liked Mr Kalkin, and at first he used to say, dismissively: "That boat will never be finished!" But one time I came out of the house on a warm evening and saw him leaning against the fence in the dusk, looking across at Mr Kalkin's heap of rusting non-flotsam, and he said, in a quiet, sad voice: "That boat will never be finished."And I stood with him and looked at Mr Kalkin's boat, and in my dad's silence he made me see all the sunsets and white sea-spray and the gold-rimmed waves and wheeling birds and the bright skies of stars that Mr Kalkin and his boat would never sail through, and he made me understand something about growing up and having a house and a job and a family.At the end of the episode Karl reflects that "maybe I'm on a spiritual journey", that maybe he needs to "make a turn, come around the corner and say I've got a lot to be grateful for". He's very blessed, thinks Karl, but still, there's a dream he can't let go of. He wants to race his birds, to show them he believes in them, and give them a chance to discover they're more than just birds living in a loft in Woodstock. I think Karl's birds are very lucky.'First Person' is on iTunes, or www.firstpersonpod.com..