All alone? It’s because we don’t want to meet the flockers
Another day, another laminated page to add to my groaning file entitled “WTF Is Wrong With People?” I was sitting in an empty café. It was just me and my laptop at one table and the barista behind the counter. Another person enters, surveys the plenitude of vacant seats spread invitingly across 700 square feet of retail space – and sits in the one right next to me.
It happens all the time and it’s insanity. A lively correspondence has recently taken place on the subject in the letters page of this very paper. People relay instances of positioning tents, windbreaks or caravans in the middle of spacious campsites, pristine beaches and rolling fields only to watch dumbfounded as the next people to arrive ignore the inviting acres of space all around and quickly set themselves up cheek-by-horrified-jowl with the original homesteaders. See also: cinema seats, gym lockers, car parks, restaurants and public transport.
(Speaking of homesteaders – wounded correspondents should take refuge in re-reading the Little House on the Prairie books. The minute anyone settles within 800 square miles of the Ingalls’ latest cabin, Pa starts complaining about overcrowding, bungs everyone back in the wagon and trundles westward again. Attaboy.)
The phenomenon is known by psychologists as “flocking”. Under any kind of pressure – even as slight as picking a spot for lunch or melanoma-courting, we head towards the familiar. Doubtless there are sound evolutionary reasons for this. On the windswept savannah it would make sense to huddle with any Neanderthal who got there before you and look out for danger together. In Caffè Nero, I would suggest however – less so. So please, take yourself and your outmoded survival instincts and move them at least three cheap leather sofas down.
There is also a less primitive though no less stupid form of reasoning going on in the minds of the people homing in on the unwary. I suspect they are actually extroverts (who make up the majority of the population and cause most of the problems in the world) and therefore think anyone on his or her own is, as they would be, in desperate need of company and that it would therefore be rude to sit further away.
Let me disabuse you as gently as I can of this notion. Anyone sitting alone is, almost certainly, fine. They have, almost certainly, arrived at that state through active choice. Most people who are that way inclined can find a friend to sit, eat, watch a film with when they want to. You are an unsettling stranger, not a friend we haven’t met yet. The next time you see someone sitting alone anywhere think not “Lonely!” but “Solitary splendour!”, multiply your own idea of personal space by six, add a nought and then back off at least twice as far, just to be sure. You Neanderthal.