Talk to the Hand Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: When Push Comes to Shove

  THE FIRST GOOD REASON Was That So Hard to Say?

  THE SECOND GOOD REASON Why am I the One Doing This?

  THE THIRD GOOD REASON My Bubble, My Rules

  THE FOURTH GOOD REASON The Universal Eff-Off Reflex

  THE FIFTH GOOD REASON Booing the Judges

  THE SIXTH GOOD REASON Someone Else Will Clean It Up

  Bibliography

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  Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. Oscar Wilde

  An apology is a gesture through which an individual splits himself into two parts: the part that is guilty of the offence, and the part that dissociates itself from the delict and affirms a belief in the offended rule. Erving Goffman

  Fuck off, Norway. Paul Gascoigne, on being asked if he had a message for the people of Norway

  Acknowledgements

  As is pretty clear in the text, Talk to the Hand owes a heavy debt to two excellent books: Mark Caldwell’s A Short History of Rudeness and Kate Fox’s Watching the English. A book about rudeness should start with as many thanks and apologies as possible, so I would like first to thank the many friends who have provided examples, sent me cuttings, or assured me I wasn’t barmy not to write the expected follow-up book on grammar: Cate Olson and Nash Robbins, John Robbins, Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Margaret and Bob Cook, Mary Walker, Cathy Stewart, Bruce Holdsworth, Philip Hensher, Faynia Williams, Richard Crane, Gideon Haigh, and Anne Baker. Andrew Hadfield told me the joke about Carnegie Hall. Douglas Kennedy had the experience in the French record shop. To my badminton pals – Andrew, Vybarr, Alan, Tom, Dan, Vicky, Martin, John, and Caroline – I say sorry (as always). I would also like to thank the nameless people who were quite rude to me during this period. Without them, this book would not have been possible.

  Talk to the Hand shares only two things with Eats, Shoots & Leaves: (1) a title comprising four one-syllable words; and (2) its origins in radio. I would like to thank the BBC Radio 4 commissioning editors who keep allowing me to appear on the airwaves, and in particular Kate McAll, the producer who supervised the original table-thumping rants on which this book is based. “Don’t bang the table” being the first law of radio broadcasting, incidentally, I have devised a rather strange method of expressing my feelings in studio, which is to sit at the microphone with arms stretched out to the sides, flapping them slowly up and down in imitation of a giant pterodactyl. Kate has always disguised her alarm at this magnificently.

  Continuing the pattern of apology and thanks, I would like to apologise to the many Telegraph readers to whose interesting and supportive letters I have not personally replied. I would very much like to apologise – again – to the kind stickler from North Carolina who sent me a beautiful wooden semicolon, hand-carved, and received no thanks until he wrote to check I had received it. And I’d like to thank my publishers and agents: Andrew Franklin, Bill Shinker, Erin Moore, Anthony Goff and George Lucas. Finally, I’d like to thank Miles Kington in the Independent for coming up with my logical follow-up title, Presses, Pants & Flies (entailing a joke about a laundryman who goes into a bar, does a few press-ups, breathes heavily and then jumps out of the window). I may still use it next time.

  Author’s note

  The author apologises for the high incidence of the word “Eff” in this book. It is, sadly, unavoidable in a discussion of rudeness in modern life. Variants such as Effing, mother-Effing, and what the Eff? positively litter the text.

  If you don’t Effing like it, you know what you can Effing do. (That’s a joke.)

  Introduction: When Push Comes to Shove

  If you want a short-cut to an alien culture these days, there is no quicker route than to look at a French phrase book. Not because the language is different, but because the first lesson you will find there usually takes place in a shop.

  “Good morning, madam.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “How may I help you?”

  “I would like some tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps please.”

  “Of course. How many tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps would you like?”

  “Seven/five/twelve, thank you.”

  “That will be six/four/two Euros. Do you have the exact money?”

  “I do.”

  “Thank you, madam.”

  “Thank you, sir. Good day!”

  “Good day!”

  Now the amazing thing is, this formal and civil exchange actually represents what happens in French shops. French shopkeepers really say good morning and goodbye; they answer questions; they wrap things ever so nicely; and when it’s all over, they wave you off like a near relation. There is none of the dumb, resentful shrugging we English shoppers have become so accustomed to. Imagine an English phrase book for French visitors, based on the same degree of verisimilitude – let’s call it “Dans le magasin”.

  “Excuse me, do you work here?”

  “What?”

  “I said, excuse me, do you work here?”

  “Not if I can help it, har, har, har.”

  “Do you have any tomatoes/eggs/postage stamps?”

  “Well, make your mind up, that’s my mobile.”

  This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble and fa
n it madly with a big hat. Does this project have any value? Well, in many ways, no. None at all. First, it is hardly original or controversial to declare oneself against rudeness. (One is reminded of that famous objection to the “Women Against Rape” campaign: “Are there any women for rape?”) Secondly, it seems that an enormous amount of good stuff has been written on this subject already, and the plate has been licked pretty clean. Thirdly, and even more discouragingly, as long ago as 1971, the great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote that “concern about public life has heated up far beyond our capacity to throw light on it”. So, to sum up: it’s not worth saying; it’s already been said; and it’s impossible to say anything adequate in any case. This is the trouble with doing research.

  However, just as my book on punctuation was fundamentally about finding oneself mysteriously at snapping point about something that seemed a tad trivial compared with war, famine, and the imminent overthrow of Western civilisation, so is Talk to the Hand. I just want to describe and analyse an automatic eruption of outrage and frustration that can at best cloud an otherwise lovely day, and at worst make you resolve to chuck yourself off the nearest bridge. You are lying in a dentist’s chair, for example, waiting quietly for an anaesthetic to “take”, and the dental nurse says, next to your left ear, “Anyway, I booked that flight and it had gone up forty quid.” At which the dentist says, in your right ear, “No! What, in two hours?” And you say, rather hotly, “Look, I’m not unconscious, you know”, and then they don’t say anything, but you know they are rolling their eyes at each other, and agreeing that you are certifiable or menopausal, or possibly both.

  Whether it’s merely a question of advancing years bringing greater intolerance I don’t think I shall bother to establish. I will just say that, for my own part, I need hardly defend myself against any knee-jerk “grumpy old woman” accusations, being self-evidently so young and fresh and liberal and everything. It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex (“Oh, that’s so RUDE!”) presents itself in most people at just about the same time as their elbow skin starts to give out. Check your own elbow skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not be reading this book. If, on the other hand, it just sits there in a puckered fashion, a bit rough and belligerent, then you can probably also name about twenty things, right now, off the top of your head, that drive you nuts: people who chat in the cinema; young people sauntering four-abreast on the pavement; waiters who say, “There you go” as they place your bowl of soup on the table; people not even attempting to lower their voices when they use the “Eff” word. People with young, flexible elbow skin spend less time defining themselves by things they don’t like. Warn a young person that “Each man becomes the thing he hates”, and he is likely to reply, quite cheerfully, that that’s OK, then, since the only thing he really hates is broccoli.

  By contrast, I now can’t abide many, many things, and am actually always on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I hear of someone being “gluten intolerant” or “lactose intolerant”, for example, I feel I’ve been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that gluten crap? Lactose has had its own way long enough. Yet I still, amazingly, deny a rightward drift in my thinking. I merely ask: isn’t it odd, the way many nice, youngish liberal people are beginning secretly to admire the chewing-gum penalties of Singapore? Isn’t it odd, the way nice, youngish liberal people, when faced with a teenaged boy skateboarding in Marks & Spencer’s, feel a righteous urge to stick out a foot and send him somersaulting into a rack of sensible shoes? I will admit that the mere thought of taking such direct and beautiful vengeance – “There he goes!” – fills me with a profound sort of joy.

  ! # * !

  Why is this not a handbook to good manners? Why will you not find rules about wielding knives and forks, using a mobile phone, and sending thank-you notes? I have several reasons for thinking that the era of the manners book has simply passed. First, what would be the authority of such a book, exactly? Why would anyone pay attention to it? This is an age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence, in which many people have been trained to distrust and reject all categorical answers, and even (I’ve noticed with alarm) to dispute points of actual law without having the shadow of a leg to stand on. However, this is not to say that manners are off the agenda in today’s rude world. Far from it. In fact, what is so interesting about our charming Eff-Off society is that perceived rudeness probably irritates rough, insolent people even more than it peeves polite, deferential ones. As the American writer Mark Caldwell points out in A Short History of Rudeness (1999), if you want to observe status-obsessed people who are exquisitely sensitive to slights, don’t read an Edith Wharton novel, visit San Quentin. Rudeness is a universal flashpoint. My main concern in writing this book is to work out why, all of a sudden, this is the case.

  Another argument against laying down rules of etiquette is that we no longer equate posh behaviour with good behaviour, which is a splendid development, posh people being notoriously cruel to wildlife and apt to chuck bread rolls at each other when excited. Who wants to behave like a posh person? I know I don’t. I recently met a very posh person, the husband of (let’s say) a theatrical producer, and when I asked if he was himself in (let’s say) theatrical producing, he just said, “Oh God, no”, and refused to elaborate. Is this good manners? Well, the best you can say about it is that it’s very English, which is not the same. As the anthropologist Kate Fox points out in her fascinating Watching the English (2004), it is a point of honour in English society to effect all social introductions very, very badly. “One must appear self-conscious, ill-at-ease, stiff, awkward, and above all, embarrassed,” she writes. The handshake should be a confusion of half-gestures, apologies, and so on. And as for cheek-kissing, it is an established rule that someone will always have to say, “Oh, are we doing two?” Also essential in the introductory process, she says, is that on no account should you volunteer your own name or ask a direct question to establish the identity of the person you are speaking to.

  I must admit that this last rule explained quite a lot to me. My standard behaviour at parties is to announce straight away who I am, and then work quite strenuously to ascertain the name and profession of the person I’m speaking to – mainly because I wish to avoid that familiar heart-stopping moment at the end of the evening when the host says, “So what did you make of my old friend the Archbishop of Canterbury, then? Looks good in mufti, doesn’t he? You seemed to be telling him off-colour jokes for hours.” However, it turns out that asking direct questions is socially naff, while the “Oh God, no” response is the one that is actually demanded by the compensatory instincts of good breeding. No wonder I have so often ended up playing Twenty Questions with chaps who seem to pride themselves on being Mister Clam the Mystery Man.

  “So. Here we are at Tate Modern,” I say. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name. I expect you are front-page famous which will make this an embarrassing story to tell all my clued-up friends.”

  “Oh no.”

  “No?”

  “Well, I’m known to a select few, I suppose. Mainly abroad. Nineteen.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve got nineteen questions left. You’ve just used one.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. All right. Are you in the arts?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Eighteen.”

  “Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral, ha ha?”

  “Mm. Like everybody, I believe, I’m mainly water. Seventeen.”

  “I see. Well. Look. Are you the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

  “No. Although there have been some notable clerics in the female line. Sixteen.”

  “Do your bizarre trousers hold any clue to your profession?”

  “How very original of you to draw attention to my bizarre trousers. Fifteen.”

  “Do you own a famous stately home in the north of
England?”

  “Um, why do you ask?”

  “Just a wild stab.”

  “Well, I like your style, but no. Fourteen.”

  “I give up. Who are you?”

  “Not allowed. Thirteen.”

  “All right. I was trying to avoid this. If I got someone strong to pin your arms back, where would I find your wallet?”

  It’s always been this way, apparently, in so-called polite society. People go out and meet other people, but only so that they can come home again without anyone piercing the veil of their anonymity in the period in between. George Mikes made a related point in his wonderful How to be an Alien (1946): “The aim of introduction [in England] is to conceal a person’s identity. It is very important that you should not pronounce anybody’s name in a way that the other party may be able to catch it.”

  Until recently, of course, people did aspire to posh manners. Hence the immense popularity, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both Britain and America, of books that satisfied middle-class anxieties and aspirations – and incidentally fuelled snobbery. Books such as Letitia Baldridge’s Complete Guide to the New Manners for the ’90s (referring to the 1890s) or the umpteen editions since 1922 of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage existed because they were needed: as society became more fluid, people found themselves in unfamiliar situations, where there was a danger that they would embarrass themselves by punching the hotel porter for stealing their suitcase, or swigging from a finger-bowl, or using the wrong fork to scratch their noses. Cue the loud, general gasp of well-bred horror. Well, sod all that, quite frankly, and good riddance. Old-fashioned manners books have an implicit message: “People better than you know how to behave. Just follow these rules and with a bit of good luck your true origins may pass undetected.” It is no accident that the word “etiquette” derives from the same source as “ticket”. It is no accident, either, that adherence to “manners” has broken down just as money and celebrity have largely replaced birth as the measure of social status.