Impressionable Youth

"The trouble with first impressions," someone once smugged, "Is that you only get to make one."

The irony here, of course, is that any swan-necked debutante who happened to waft within earshot when this epigram gushed forth would have formed the first impression of its provider being a nob. (Incidentally, who do you think came up with this maxim, sharper than lemon eye drops? Oscar Wilde? Stephen Fry? Nope, it was a character from that generational moral compass, The Simpsons.)

As the hot-headed hue of youth fades to pale grey resignation of the terribly boring twenties, I feel my intolerance for other people fading like a backstreet tattoo. Bombarded by nostalgia pangs and reunion invites, I am starting to reassess those people I may have been a teensy bit hasty in labelling tossers.

At primary school, I hated a girl called Jessica Necci. She was horrid, with tightly coiled hazelnut hair delicately piled atop her porcelain face. Her milky skin, cheeks blushed with a tinge of Botichellian pink, tenderly dusted with demerera brown freckles. Like I said, horrid. I was very mean to Jessica; I used to call her 'Jessica Smelly' (not one of my best,) chase her in the playground with wet sticks and generally do things that would nowadays be tantamount to harassment.


You see, I didn't hate Jessica at all - I was hopelessly and completely in love with her. But you're not supposed to show it at that age. It's called 'playing really hard and rather roughly to get'. The first impression Jessica gave me was on of being both gorgeous and not interested. This immediately damned my fragile heart to years of lonely exile as the girl of my dreams played hopscotch with my best mate.

Since that fateful jilting I have never paid too close attention to first impressions; the more I do, the more I see that they not only matter, but they are nearly always erroneous.

Your very first impression of someone can come in a variety of ways. You could meet them face to face, receive an email from them, or hear from them on the phone - you could wake up lying next to them in a stuffy haze of Neurofen and regret.

The old-fashioned, visual way of summarising and judging a person by what they look like and what they wear serves only to compartmentalise the diversity of the human race - and usher forth stereotyped ideas. For example, categories could exist such as 'fat', 'ugly', 'hot', 'stylish', 'fleet-footed' or 'grotesque and offensive to all five senses'. Within the category of, say, 'fat', we have sub-categories such as 'jolly', 'self-loathing' or 'on the rebound'. All this unauthorised categorization is done instantaneously, with each of us having utter conviction that the lump we see wobbling before us is the very embodiment of our pre-judgement.

These prejudices go on to temper our opinion of every person we meet. First impressions from a nice fat person will be different from a nice, skinny and stunning one. We expect the fat person to be nice: they are fat, they need to be. We expect the skinny one to be a bitch and when he or she isn't, our first impressions of 'mmm, good looking' are compounded by a pleasant peripetaia of expectation.

Visual first impressions don't just count apply to people. Every metallic blue Porsche that roars past depicts to us not a finely-tuned harmony of German engineering verve, but a hollow shell of a man on his way from the place where he leaves his integrity at night to a Cristal party where he snorts drugs off a midget's head before collapsing in the foetal postition and lamenting the loss of his soul while gently rocking and sucking his thumb.

Even website impressions are made within the blink of an eye. So please don't be put off by my blog's colour scheme, chosen by Robert Mugabe's wardrobe stylist. If appearence matters, it matters instantly.

Why have these expectations derived from appearence at all? We, as busy and immensely important people need a way of rapidly differentiating people from the faceless human masses, even if first visual impressions only serve to provide a rather insular sub-category.

But such first impressions are usually wrong; that a person is fat doesn't make them any more or less likely to be a bastard or a flirt.

(As I write, I hear myself sounding more and more like a Chakrabartian limpet, extolling the tired argument that their is inherent good in everyone, regardless of appearance. That's not what I mean. Judge people on their looks by all means. And use that judgement to inform your subsequent interaction. The important thing to prevent that becoming irreversible.)

It is a good thing that first impressions are wrong. As our expectations are confounded, we feel the electric thrill of surprise. We smile at the downright quirkiness of the situation. I have been guilty of sticking doggedly to first impressions of people I know (formed, admittedly, from interaction and not just visual factors,) even when they are proved by many others to be woefully misguided.

So I am slowly beginning to reassess and question my first impressions of people I have reviled since I first laid disparaging eyes on them. The first came yesterday, when meeting up with someone who, at a push, could be termed an acquaintance if I really needed a favour. I spent time with this man, and he was charming, fun, effervescent. I'd never given him a chance - so blinded was I by a first impression of idiocy and narcicissm. He also has a peirced ear which, to my uninitiated prejudice, proved he was either gay or a criminal.

He was neither. He is nice. I was wrong.

Of course, this reappraisal of friends and enemies is a two-way thing. Just as I am beginning to enjoy the company of people I've held nothing but disdain for, I could conceivably start spontaneously hating my friends.

So be nice. I'm impressionable, after all.