Adventures in Ordinary Salutation
Apparently there comes a time in this life and in the history of human development and interaction when basic salutations take on a value similar to pork bellies, soy beans or light sweet crude on the world markets. Now is that time and London is the place to learn how to fold on hellos and raise on goodbyes. Except that I can’t do it.
When I first arrived here I could not help but saying good morning or evening when I walked up to a crowded bus stop or into an elevator with more occupants than myself. The thing as you know is that greetings are by their nature benevolently reciprocal fishing lines, your “hello” being the wormlike bait thrown in to land an equivalent answer or even the minnow of a nod. As each greeting fell like leaden stones into each unresponsive abyss I learned not to throw my pearls before swine. A hail at bus stops all along Acre Lane to Brixton High Street will get you a nod or even a nostalgic and welcome “Mawning Dawta”. There is little point in trying this at Holborn and to be fair I probably wouldn’t try it in Kingston either. The office though is an entirely different story.
It is bad enough that the default work configuration is open plan, designed I am told to enhance the flattened structure of office management systems and to remove barriers to communication but whose real effect is to remove the capacity for you to surf the internet or scratch personal zones without the prying eyes of your colleagues. You are not only cheek by jowl with at least three people at a time due to the intersecting grid set up but you might have the odd itinerant face parachuting onto the hot desk two seats away. The faces that are familiar which you see every day in the elevator, the cafeteria, at the next bank of desks and computor screens are made of stone. They seem genuinely discomfitted when you offer any form of personal greeting. A good morning said at a moderate decibel level in these beehives is ignored yet you can almost feel the chagrin oozing out of their pores when a week or two later they must engage you in a meeting or other work related activity as they try to pretend that they had not been pretending not to hear you for the past two months.
While you would think no one needs to be taught the value of a howdy it would seem a return to manners should be this season’s black. I don’t feel myself provincial, particularly old-fashioned or indeed unable to deal. Everybody knows that a how do you today will stand you in good stead with the person who might have to help you fix the copier or influence a raise tomorrow. I think this avoidance of personal conection from the seemingly innocuous incidents described here leads to the more egregious disconnect we read about where whole busloads of people sit by as one passenger terrorises another. A hello whether grunted or wreathed in sunshine is just a another sign of our humanity, more proof that we are part of something, we are some bodies and we see and acknowledge each other’s existences on this plane and we are still happy to be on this side of the shade. For how then can you legitimately invite people to the pub nearby for farewell drinks if you never said hello in the first place? Apart from being the first weapon in the arsenal of decent behaviour your parents equipped you with when you were old enough to say “Taa” surely everyone knows a hello is the easiest and cheapest way of paying it forward?
So after careful observation and notwithstanding the eight times out of ten when it is unreciprocated I think I shall carry on, for I really do it for me and for those two possibilities. My own poet laureate Ms Lou advised that doing it neither costs nor weighs anything.It takes nothing away from me and may even add to the quality of my days. I will not take it any farther, I wont enquire into the state of your finances or your personal life. All I mean when I say it is simply Good Morning Neighbour.
Dispatches From An Island Girl 