18th September 2024

While living in Norwich, my next-door neighbour and I sought to join a badminton club, and we were recommended one that met on Friday evenings in half a school gym. Another club simultaneously used the other half, but we were warned not to try there as ‘they aren’t very friendly’. We went along, introduced ourselves, played as guests for two or three weeks and were duly invited to join. We continued to enjoy the friendship of that club for a good couple of years, and sometimes, between games, we’d watch ‘the other lot’ down the opposite end of the gym – and to be honest, they did seem rather full of themselves and cliquey! Merry and I moving away to Bristol brought this particular chapter to its end.

However, a few years later we found out by chance that my neighbour and I that first night had somehow gone in the wrong door and wound up joining the wrong club, the unfriendly bunch we’d been warned against! The surprise of this discovery was both amusing and salutary. I was put out to find how much my views had been influenced by the untested opinion of that person who’d originally recommended one club over the other, how much I’d ‘seen’ what I expected to see rather than what was before my eyes, how much I’d read into innocent behaviour.

This has left me wary in case I’m sometimes too quick to form judgements of others before I really know enough about them and their circumstances. How often do the perceptions we take into a situation distort the truth of what’s to be found there?

Ken Stewart