Have you ever found yourself in a crowded place and started to watch all the people milling around you? I don’t mean just to count heads, or to find out whose jacket is the coolest, or whether other people have brought umbrellas and maybe you should have brought your own because it looks like rain after all. Do you ever watch how people act when they’re all crowded together? Can you see little groups forming, little huddles of people that have found something in common? Have you ever caught snippets of conversation that make no sense whatsoever to you, but you wish you were part of the conversation because everyone sounds so interested in what’s being said? What’s more, have you taken the time to notice the people that aren’t part of any group, that are standing on their own and that make you wonder whether they chose to be alone or if they wish they had a friend to talk to?
If you ever find yourself feeling bored whilst stood on a crowded train station platform, or on a busy beach in the middle of summer whilst you’re sunbathing, or in the village hall that your aunty has hired for your family reunion, look at everyone around you, and try to imagine how they’re feeling. It’s very entertaining when you have nothing to do.
Mealtimes are always good for people-watching. Where there’s food, there’s bound to be people, and you’ll have a whale of a time thinking up stories for each person that you see. It’s very likely that you’ll be eating too, so that’s twice as much fun. School canteens are some of the best places to see how people socialise. Young people aren’t any different to older people, you see. Whatever age you are, you’ll always find people that end up in groups, and other people that don’t.
Take this particular school canteen, for example. Even if you were to close your eyes, your ears would be able to tell you where people have found their friends, because those are the places where the most noise is coming from. Look closely, and you can see the group of boys trading virtual football cards between each other’s tablets, who are sat between the window and a table full of boys and girls that are sat eating their lunch very quietly and not talking very much, because they are comfortable enough with each other that they don’t mind being quiet for a while. In the middle of the room there will probably be a big group of boys who are bragging to each other about who got the most kills in their latest video game, and whose dad has bought them the most video games, and who knows when the sequel to their last favourite video game will be coming out, because that is the sort of thing that boys who play a lot of video games and don’t do a lot of homework like to brag about. Their entire social structure is built around buying and playing and completing video games, and whilst their teachers complain that their grades aren’t as good as they should be because they prefer to play rather than do their sums or draw a diagram of the water cycle, in fact they’re learning important things like puzzle solving and hand-eye coordination and fearlessness, which are all very useful skills that you don’t often learn in school.
Then you will see a small group of wide-eyed girls who spend every lunchtime and playtime inventing fantasy worlds to play in, because to them fairies and wizards and unicorns are as real as you or me. You should compare them to the group of girls sat on the opposite side of the room from the trading cards boys, who are braiding each other’s hair in-between mouthfuls, and loudly discussing the merits of their favourite boy band members, and which songs they prefer to all the others, and which song from the album should be their next single. (You might even notice that these girls are somewhat similar to the video game boys, except that they learn dance moves and lyrics and write very moving letters to their favourite bands, which are also very useful skills to have.) Here and there, you will see a boy sat on his own doing his homework on his tablet as he eats, a small group made up of girls and boys who are talking very loudly about what happened on the Heroes’ Lottery on television last night, a pair of girls who both play the piano and like an entirely different kind of music from the boy band girls, a very little girl sat in the corner of the room whose shoulders are shaking because she is crying and doesn’t want anyone else to see, three boys who take dance lessons together on a Wednesday night but haven’t dared to let anyone else know in case they might be made fun of, a boy who with a very big smile on his face for no reason at all, and three or four girls who will pick at their food and throw most of it away because they are worried about getting fat, when in fact they are all rather skinny and could do with eating something filling to keep their strength up.
