The art of people-watching

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Going to meet somebody off the plane is outside the usual range activities of somebody for visiting the UK on holiday, but this happened to me one summer. The change of role was energizing and, during the long wait at Arrivals – the plane was slow disembarking – it led to the people-watching experience which gave the poem below, the next piece in this scrapbook of travel tales.

People-watching requires no specific qualifications, just a little time and the curiosity to do something other than scrolling through irrelevant notifications on your phone. This means that, instead of looking down, you look up. What does that change? What may turn up in our immediate environment has not been chosen by an algorithm. At least, not yet.

When you look up to people-watch, you are the one who makes the decisions. You are the one who does the noticing or the not noticing, depending on where you are, why you’re there and how you feel.

People are the backdrop, the actors and the authors of all you see, and their apparently random actions are the focus of your attention. At the Arrivals gate in a busy airport the variety of all this movement can be just as absorbing as its apparent sameness. You see people waiting, walking, wondering or simply wishing things would get a move on. Others may be in conversation, or lost in the details of careful acts such as taking items from one bag and putting them, one by one, into another. Why are they doing this? You’ll probably never know.

The possibilities for interpreting such actions are endless. You can try and imagine who they are, what their lives are like. Or simply let your mind float, staring into space if you feel like it, thinking about something which has nothing to do with where you are or what’s happening.

As I people watched that day at Gatwick, it felt like I’d been away and I was home again. I watched people emerging through the Arrivals gate with their bags and suntans – I was an undercover Brit and I felt native again. Here I was in a place which they called home, to which they were returning, but which was no longer home to me.

I watched their facial expressions, their body language. I looked at their clothes, some of which were clearly holiday souvenirs. Would this be how I looked when I got home to France? I wondered. I couldn’t help feeling, as they pocketed their phones for a minute and wended their weary way towards the papershops and the takeaway drinks counter, that although they were home again – and it is so nice to come home – that maybe, just maybe, they were already planning their next getaway. I scribbled some of this down on a scrap of paper. Nothing elaborate.

People-watching is anthropology for beginners. Give it a try. There are no cameras. Look up from that phone, smile and enjoy the view.

The poem which follows is what happened when I looked at that scrap of paper again. I became that person carefully taking items from one bag and putting them into another bag.

People emerge from holidays
Equipped with teas and kids
And coffees with lids,

Buy papers as if they were
Prescriptions for relief,
Belief or disbelief.

Tans move majestically
But flipflop feet bare
Cannier souls in there.

Seeming to plod home,
The while giving shape
To some future escape.

HOME AND AWAY AGAIN