The unwritten rules

If someone helps you here, you have not completed a transaction. You have started a relationship. That is not a burden, it is how the whole thing works.

Accept help readily and look for the moment to return it. The people who struggle most are the ones who insist on paying for everything so that they owe nobody anything. That reads as coldness even when it is meant as good manners.

In a city you get a fresh start with every new group. Here you do not. How you spoke to the person at the counter, how you treated a contractor, whether you did what you said you would do, all of it travels and it travels quickly.

This is the hardest adjustment for people used to being brusque in one part of their life and charming in another. It is also, once you accept it, quite freeing. You only have to be one person.

The great superpower of city life is that nobody knows you. Newcomers keep reaching for it and it is not there. You will be recognised in the supermarket, at the beach, and on a Tuesday when you look terrible.

Trying to live privately here reads as standoffish rather than dignified. That is not fair, but it is true.

The conversation before the business is not a delay preventing the business. It is the business.

People here decide whether to work with you on the basis of whether they like and trust you, and they establish that in the first ten minutes of apparently unrelated chat. Rushing it signals that you think your time is worth more than theirs, which is the single most expensive impression you can make on a small island.

You will be asked to help with things. You cannot say yes to everything and you should not try.

But you will see this person again, at a school gate or a wedding or a funeral. So how you decline matters more than whether you decline. Be specific, be warm, and offer the one thing you can do instead of the thing you cannot.

Not a nice extra once you are settled. The entry ticket.

The fastest route into this community is being useful at something nobody else wants to do. Turn up to the working party. Take a turn on the committee. Coach the under elevens. That is how a place this size has always decided who belongs. There is more on this in making friends as an adult on a small island.

Islanders complain about Guernsey constantly and with real skill. In your first year, do not join in.

It lands completely differently coming from someone who chose to come here. Wait until somebody invites you to, and they will.

This is covered properly on its own page, but it belongs on this list. Nobody is ignoring you. Everybody is indoors.

None of this is gatekeeping. It is what happens anywhere everybody has to live with the consequences of how they treat each other. Most of it is simply what community looked like everywhere, before it stopped.