My travellers experiences
It’s Saturday, we, Em and I, are in a shop in Shrewsbury and I am being served by the single employee that is at the desk. There are a couple of girls who came in after me waiting patiently for their turn. I have been there 10 minutes because I am trying to return something under warranty and the guy serving is trying to establish if they can sort that.
In pops a traveller, immediately she is beside me and attempting to capture the attention of the teller. Speaking loudly as he speaks to me, he first ignores the question and keeps telling me what he was already saying. Being ignored does not deter our new traveller friend. What she does next is to walk over to a display cabinet and shout another question loudly toward the server, which he also does not respond to. At this point the traveller lady decides that she must unjustifiably be being ignored, and her action is to reappear at my side, close to the server and she starts directly engaging him with further questioning.
Now we are three interventions deep at this point, it would be a reasonable assumption by any person who had grown up in UK society and noticed how normal interactions tend to work, that there was business already being conducted in this shop that was holding the attention of the attendant, so a reasonable person might wish to wait until an opportunity that we could give the name “their turn” showed up before they moved to the stage where they felt they were being ignored as a discourtesy. The difference though with our traveller was that she started the first interaction with a palpable attitude toward the server, as well as those already being served or waiting, that she had the right to interrupt no matter what was happening, the second interaction as if she was unhappy that she had been ignored and couldn’t gain control of the environment, and the third interaction as if she had been insulted by not being attended to because in her estimation maybe the server was being rude.
At this point, post interaction three, the server did respond by saying that “I’m with a customer at the moment, and there are others waiting”, but he said it professionally and courteously, not snappily. Now I imagined that, given the previous obvious attitude of this customer, we would witness a crescendo in proceedings, a bit of vocal argument, but it did not arrive, and it got me thinking as it often does, why?
I don’t know a lot about travellers, but I know this…. we wouldn’t dislike and mistrust them so much if they would refrain from being societally problematic, at least some of the time. That would be my initial attitude if I was just a surface thinker, but I wanted to think a bit more about this, so I did. Mainly because I have not had a bad experience with travellers, and that is because I have not had a great deal of interaction with them, so I can be objective and unblemished, and look at this from a perspective of external observation. Others may disagree in one direction or the other, and I may be getting what I am about to write completely wrong (ever a possibility in my writing of course).
The traveller woman backed off somewhat, seeming to accept what the server had said as reasonable. But why had she pushed this to this point in the first place, where he had to respond at all? There seemed no reason for it, she would be served in turn, likely all preceding interactions having no effect on the timing of that, so no point in having them. Nothing that had happened up to this point within the interactions between these persons and the witnessing of such by the other persons in the shop had had any useful effect on the situation or the condition that the lady would be attended to in good time, and none of it made her more endearing or attractive as a customer who wished to purchase something. This vendor has fixed pricing and fixed discounting, so there is no gain from enacting a pseudo-hostile stance. I just could not get my head around the why of what I was in the middle of, until I thought about it later on that day. Here is what I came to speculate…
People who isolate their tribe or group from the mass of society, like travellers often do, and form and ferment a cultural way of doing things that is unique to them, are often at odds with a society that they then must by necessity interact with to purchase and sell goods or services. A person cannot help being a reflection of the circumstances they develop within, but they can notice that the circumstances they find themselves within are different than the ones that formed them. We often describe this observation using a couple of descriptive phrases, “Read the room” is one where we must adapt our expectation of being received in word or deed as potentially being at odds with what is acceptable, “when in Rome” is another where we know that our usual expectations need to be pre-modified because we are going to be within circumstances where external expectations greatly differ to what is normal to us.
For our Traveller lady, she possibly enacts the behaviour she was formed in and is used to. Theirs, travellers, is a loudest or strongest voice mentality, with perceived preference determined by status of the individual within the group, it is maybe not as a result of societal behavioural decorum which posts all persons as equal and befitting attention by order of arrival. Of course there are caveats to this where rich people circumnavigate the necessities of ordered turns by paying a fast-lane price, and we must also recognise where familiarity can taint the vendor-customer relationship too, but normally amongst newly interacting strangers we can expect that there is a turn based system as a norm. We non-travellers often view the traveller approach as rudeness because it does not fit with our norms, and because it does not fit it is unacceptable. We don’t endeavour to understand it because we are the larger demographic, so we are not compelled to accept it, we are compelled to resist it. I think this division may make a traveller feel like they are both a minority, and oppressed, because of their difference in normal conventions when it comes to conversing and trading.
To them they are maybe not being rude at all, this may be how they interact with each other, it just looks rude to us. As soon as attention had been given, that the lady had been noticed and had had some sort of a response, the situation seemed to calm quite a bit on the part of all the participants apart from her, because she had been calm throughout. Now I can draw multiple conclusions from that, that she had successfully drawn attention which may have been needed by her psychologically, she may be a prominent person in her community structure and used to being first in any queue she occupied (say like when food is being communally produced she may jump the line), or she may feel that while out in the world, “amongst the gorger”, she is dealing with a lesser people than the traveller and has to afford no kindness toward them, or she may be playing a tactical move that works some of the time. Let’s explore that one a moment….
Travellers are traders, they trade their own produced goods, and their labour skills, for money. In some ways we all do this, but unlike them we are often governed by frameworks that are imposed and the enabled scrutiny of those frameworks is realised through legality and the fact that we find it difficult, but not always impossible, to avoid taxation. If you pay tax and transact with anything other than cash then you exist on somebody’s database and are open to some analysis and legal recourse that then modifies your attitude and behaviour when trading, making, and selling. Using cash and avoiding having premises, our traders/merchants can achieve being rather illusive, which may be their goal a lot of the time I think. This avoids recourse in particular, so it is a gamble to trust that the goods or services brokered will meet long term scrutiny.
Traders know how to trade, how to negotiate, how to argue a value up or down as necessary, and since they mostly trade with each other they might come to develop a style that plays badly with other non traveller merchants. I’ve witnessed this previously when trying to resist the driveway tarmac offer, or the offer to buy my car, or the offer of a television from the back of a van while I was getting fuel, or the offer of carpet left over from a job just finished up the road. I can only describe it as aggressive unrelenting pressure, the shotgunning technique in rhetoric, where the blast is wide and seems to not stop. These guys are not like salesmen, they are more like the pal that annoys you but you just can’t bring yourself to be rude enough to tell them to fuck off.
I think this behaviour is different, uncomfortable, ill-fitting, but not actually wrong in any moral way. This is this person’s operand conditioning playing out, it is not the product of conscious and deliberate rudeness. It’s a style, for a purpose. At different times this style is in greater opposition and more problematic, especially when coupled with the distracting tactics of what appears to be feral children deployed strategically to occupy the attention of a now overrun attendant, than normal interactions with members of the public, but a style nonetheless.
A friend of mine runs a medium sized convenience store, he no longer lets travellers come in and will actively put them out if they try. He has the advantage of being quite a tough individual that can handle himself physically if needed. His experience has led him to this decision because of theft on the part of the children deployed into the shop while the parent or guardian distracts the server with some sort of dispute they have deliberately started. The kids get round and fill their pockets while the teller is too busy to keep vigil. Now in this circumstance we are seeing a crime being perpetuated by a person who intends criminality, but that does not mean that all travellers are criminals or thieves, it just means that some of them are, just like some of every group will be. The problem arises because the style that is used by the criminally intent is the same for the actor that is not committing any crime, the back-foot tactic.
Putting someone on the back foot with initial aggression is a tactic employed by folks that wish to trade something. The idea is to start aggressively and then become reasonable, and by the time reasonableness kicks in an advantage has been gained. We all know this style well now because Donald Trump uses it so much in trade negotiations (though he is not as successful with it as first seems). The traveller will be verbally aggressive initially if they feel like there is an advantage to be gained, but often (in my limited experience) this attitudinal approach can bleed into other, non trading interactions so that even when in normal conversation with a traveller it can feel like they are being somewhat aggressive. I think that that is then a mistake on their part, because it creates a standoffish relationship on the part of the person they are conversing with.
People like people, they like to talk and interact, and for all of us the most rewarding interactions come from the situations where we learn something, are entertained, or we hear a story or a perspective that is so radically different to our own that we gain something even if it is not describable. The life less ordinary, we read books and watch television programs about this so that we can vicariously assimilate an experience that we have not, and are never likely to, have ourselves. I am assuming that travellers do not actively wish to be at odds with non travellers, that they wish for acceptance of their lifestyle and world view, this may or may not be true however, it may just be an assumption on my part. If you read this and you can speak for them then please comment.
Travellers are interesting because they choose to live a life that is at odds with societal norms, they choose to be different and give great value to that difference. They choose might over right in rhetoric and deed, they choose to shun the fixed aspect of a fixed placed existence (a base), they choose to not be conventionally employed for long periods, they choose trade and negotiation and value a good deal over a fixed fair price, they choose to see the winner of dispute to be validated by the win and not the premise of the dispute. In many ways they are different to what I have described as “us”, and in many ways that is admirable. They have a sort of freedom that some of us can only dream of and are too scared to pursue because it has a responsibility for self survival and self determination that we haven’t the courage for. In other ways they seem trapped to us, burdened by what appears to be a system of historic ownership of their women in particular, akin to a sort of religious perspective we have shrugged off long ago. Their caste-like family system seems outdated and problematic in that it is feudal and unreasonable (might is right), and their internal system of settling disputes by conflict seems brutal to those that want a law to protect them instead. They are not protected by property rights because they shun property as a fixed good.
I’m neither for nor against these folks, I have not had many interactions with them, but I do find the thick Irish accent used by many of them, people who maybe have never set foot in Ireland, quite intriguing. It alone is an indication that interaction with the other, greater in number, inhabitants of this nation has been very limited in the formative years of the traveller. That alone, that lack of integration. I believe, even if I understand it in terms of the preservation of a way of life, is the main difficulty when we and they occupy the same spaces in our world and theirs. I might assume that the isolationist mentality is a form of defence, and I do think this and can understand it, but I do not believe that it is a useful way to form a person because it makes those internal to it and those external to it both wary of and likely to misunderstand the other, and it is is in misunderstanding that we find intolerance and unnecessary dispute. “Better”, “worse”, “less this”, “more that”, these are all value terms and I don’t wish to use them because I don’t know or understand enough, I’m just going to say “different” and let you decide.
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