First Impressions

This week we made our first ever foray into East Grinstead, and I was suitably inspired to compose this item. In my previous post I referred to the process whereby one becomes familiar with a piece of music, internalising it so that not only does one remember “how it goes”, but one may come to understand “how it works” or even “what it means”. Something like this process is essential in any true learning activity, capturing something “out there” and putting it “in here”, so that one can do something with it, or at the very least, obtain pleasure from it, if pleasure is there for the taking. It is a process easily overlooked in an age when accessing knowledge can be misunderstood to mean having visited certain websites or downloaded an appropriate paragraph of text.

In the nature of things, the earliest moments of exposure to a new stimulus, whether a painting, a place, a poem, or a person are highly vulnerable to distortion and deflection by chance factors. Cliché tells us that interviewers make up their minds about a candidate in the first few seconds; a career may be made or destroyed thanks to a choice of tie or handbag, some quirk of body language, some chemical reaction that went exothermic or simply didn’t want to happen. So it may be with other kinds of stimulus too.

With a place, our first impression is at the mercy of our current mood and preoccupations, the clemency or otherwise of the weather, the preconceptions we have brought along for the ride, and the method and route of our approach. We may set off on the wrong foot in a place of acclaimed merit if the first we see of it is a petrochemical complex, an estate of discount carpet warehouses, a wasteland of highway intersections, or a scabrous slum. I have a friend who is frightened of Brixton because of what he’s seen on television. A city or an entire nation may be damned by a run-in with a psychotic cabbie, a paranoid immigration officer or a dysmenorrheic  waitress. Equally we may feel unnecessarily charitable to somewhere because the sun came out, a shop assistant smiled, or an over-artistically-wrapped praline had been deposited on our pillow in anticipation of our arrival. None of these things happened to me on my brief encounter with East Grinstead this week; instead there was a biting east wind, snow was in the air, the traffic was knotty and there was nowhere to park. Consequently - as regards this hilly and apparently prosperous town - I don’t know how it goes, how it works, or what it means, for we carried on, remarking on how the initial perception of places is so dependent upon unreasonable subjective variables. And thus I can report the final score : Alpha Plus. To Eastbourne.