Learning the Rules of Lonership.

The village Jubilee celebrations have been much in evidence this afternoon. The village hall and school are only about a hundred yards up the lane, and the bottom end of the festivity site is almost opposite my house. Part of me wanted to go, but there were several personal reasons why it would have been a bad idea. The main one is private, but there's another that might be of interest in a general sense:

I’ve been a bit of a loner all my life, and if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s this:

Being alone in a crowd is fine as long as it’s a random crowd – say, a town centre, a theatre or a football match. Such crowds are made up of unrelated individuals and groups, so most of them don’t know each other. A loner mingles easily in a crowd like that.

Something like the village Jubilee event is different. There, everybody is with a group, and most of those groups are well known to each other. It’s a community thing, almost like an extended family. Being alone in such a crowd imparts a heavy sense of isolation which even I find unpleasant. I’ve been in that situation many times and the principle holds true almost without exception. And I’ve found – also virtually without exception – that it’s a myth to suggest that people in such situations make the lone person welcome. Generally, they don’t.

In the final analysis, you have to be who you are and know what you should and shouldn’t do. It’s what comes of following your own road, and that can’t be bad, can it?