Being Unfamiliar.

As I walked down the lane tonight, I kept hearing short, small, scurrying sounds in the hedgerows. It took me several minutes to work out that it was nothing more than dry leaves falling to the ground and rattling against other dry leaves. I’ve heard it countless times through my life, but almost always in daylight. I didn’t start the night walks until December last year when the autumn leaves were pretty much all gone, and so I didn’t immediately make the connection between the sound and its cause. It was unfamiliar because the context was unfamiliar.

It’s the same with people. I lived in an inner city area for nearly ten years and grew fully used to its cosmopolitan nature. There were many languages, skin colours and modes of dress to be heard and seen every day. Where I live now is different. Ashbourne is a traditional English market town with an almost wholly white demographic. Black and Asian faces are a fairly rare sight, and when I see one I find my curiosity piqued. Who is this person? Why is he here? Has he moved into the town or is he a visitor? He’s unfamiliar because the context is unfamiliar.

In my case it’s an academic form of curiosity and a psychological phenomenon to be observed and rationalised, but others might see it differently. The basic level of human nature is easily roused to suspicion of the unfamiliar, and suspicion easily turns to the perception of menace or the potential for menace. I’m told that in the terraced streets of the industrial city in which I grew up, kids would sometimes throw stones at strangers – even white strangers. I suppose the purpose was to demonstrate that the stranger would have a fight on his hands if he proved to be any sort of a threat. And I think that maybe there’s a lesson to be taken when we find ourselves easily roused to judgement of both the unfamiliar and people’s reaction to it.