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Good morning. Earlier this week, sitting in the back of a taxi, the driver began telling me a series of short stories from life inside his car. The couple leaving the works party together and she saying to him, ‘I never knew you thought this way about me’. The man kissing his girlfriend goodbye - then calling his wife to say he’s still at the office. Most of his stories, it seemed, were about infidelity, deception and betrayal. His passengers talk so freely, he said, because, they forget he can hear them. But others want to talk to him. A woman gets into his car who cannot stop crying – she’s just broken up with her partner of five years. I try to be supportive, says my driver, but when we get to her house, she doesn’t want to get out. She just wants to talk, just wants to be listened to. People talk to me, he says, because they will never meet me again. But there’s another thing, he adds: ‘They talk to me because they cannot see my face. ‘I’m like a priest. It’s as if they are confessing to me.’ Parents often learn that when the time comes for a difficult conversation with a child, one guarantee of failure is to sit down opposite them and look them in the eye. The most fruitful conversations are side-by-side - walking somewhere together, or as they sit by you on a drive to school. This is sometimes called sideways listening. When you can’t see each others faces. A face is both open and shy, sometimes revealing the soul – sometimes obscuring it. It is our most nuanced communication system - sending messages that we may be unaware of. The purse of a lip, the tilt of an eyebrow, the furrowed forehead. Our faces carry something unique about our public and our private selves… hence the opposition of civil liberties groups when the police want to use live facial recognition technology. Capturing and collecting our faces. Stealing them, critics would say. Our faces enrich communication - some people find talking on the phone an ordeal because of the absence of facial cues. For others, that absence is a relief. Eye contact can be solace but at other times a little scary. Then it may help not to see the face of the priest in the confessional – or the expression of the driver in the taxi. There’s an odd story in the Bible where Moses is asked to hide in the cliff face because the divine presence is about to come close. Cover yourself up, comes the voice of God, because ‘no-one can see my face and live’. Going for a walk with a friend or taking a taxi might be the best way to let it all out … and let it all go. The sideways confessional. Heart to heart does not always need face to face.