Impress me

First impressions count.  People think you can tell a lot about people by what you notice on first seeing them.  This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

The online writing course I'm doing encourages us to sit in cafes and make notes about the people that we see. This has caused me to sit in cafes, drink tea, eat cake and think about writing. People watching has always been a hobby of mine and I like to wonder and imagine what their story is but instead of being inspired I have just started think about how wrong it is possible to be.  I've also been thinking about how long it can take for the truth about a person to reveal itself and how there can be things about people you think you know really well that suddenly surprise you.  I'm not talking about the skeletons in the closet that someone has carefully hidden or the things they have hidden in plain sight, like Jimmy Saville and his paedophillia. I'm talking about the boring things things like, "How could I have not known that you hate cheese, I've known you forever," or "You hate cats?  Really? You always 'like' everyone's cat pictures on Facebook."

Then, while I was thinking about first impressions a man appeared on the TV in tears.  He had been judged on what he was wearing and the world was horrified.  "Those bloody feminists, making a man cry, not appreciating the work he's actually done and judging him by his clothes."  This makes me smile.  The irony of it.  Feminists are being blamed for doing something to a man that everyone does to women all the time.  Just look at the comments about any reality TV programme and you will see that they are about what the woman in wearing and what the man says. I do feel quite sorry for the man, who doesn't strike me as the least bit mysoginistic but just has a terrible taste in shirts.  It also makes me really sad that a woman would think that she wouldn't be welcomed to work with this man because he likes brightly coloured shirts with cartoon women on.  If you were clever enough to work in this area of science, you are surely clever enough to tell him that you hate his shirt? I'm not saying that I approve of the way women are 'cartoonised' to have enormous boobs and tiny waists but I don't approve of David Beckham being paraded around in his pants for women to drool over either.

Dr Matt Taylor doing a press conference in shorts and the offending shirt (Picture from the Independent)

Then I noticed a story about a Newsreader, Karl Stefanovic in Australia, who had worn the same blue suit for a year and not one person had commented.  He started doing it in support of his co-presenter who would get terrible comments on her outfits on a daily basis and could never wear the same thing twice.  However, on the video clip he begins to wonder if it is actually sexism because he had noticed that the comments his co-host received were from women, not men, who are clearly thinking about things other than the clothes. Maybe, these are the same 'feminists' who didn't like the scientist's shirt.

Karl Stefanovic and his co-presenter who can't stand the smell anymore

So, in my cake eating sessions, I have been looking at people's clothes and wondering what they are telling me about the person.  It's not something I'm very good at because I'm always more interested in what people say and do than what they wear but I realise that other people do focus more on the outer packaging.   Is it wrong to assume that the woman in the top with the horrizontal blue lines owns a boat? or that the 50 year old woman wearing socks with her pumps, a gilet with straw in the pocket and an alice band in her hair is in an unhappy marriage and loves her horse more?  A friend joked recently that she was worried that the man she had seen at the hospital hadn't been a proper neurologist because he wasn't wearing a bow tie, so maybe clothes are a more important part of the story that I thought.

And now, I am not only unable to write but desperately anxious about what my appearance is telling people.  I don't make much effort and wear a lot of black and I don't think I even brushed my hair this morning.  I am concerned that I might look like a bit of a lush, who is too hungover to take any care over her appearance.  I worry about this because, despite being a boring non-drinker who likes to stay at home and not really talk to anyone when I'm not working, the children at school think I'm a bit of a party animal.  I know this because they were challenged to design a house for me (it was a shapes and perimiter maths challenge) and they gave me a bar in the garden so that I could 'entertain all my friends'.  I'm also a little worried that my dress sense makes me look less than normal because on Friday the Foundation Stage class were a bit distracted by the rain and one child said that it felt as though they shouldn't be at school.  I agreed with him and said that I thought it was the kind of day when you should be tucked under a duvet in your pyjamas watching a film.  Another child looked at me, wide-eyed in disbelief and said, "Do you actually have a telly?......Really?"