Plunkett-Hogge Kay - Manners: A Modern Field Guide

Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

Rebecca Solnit

Having beautiful manners is not about knowing how to seat a duke at lunch or what to wear for drinks at six, as opposed to dinner at eight. Good manners are not about being pretentious or excluding others via some sort of arcane salad-fork-based mystery code, and they are absolutely not about trying to catch people out. You are better than your place setting. In an increasingly ungracious world, good manners are about aspiring to graciousness and navigating a sometimes rocky path with ease, charm and a little lan.

Good manners are simply codified kindness, and being in possession of them enhances the quality of your everyday life and that of the people around you. Its not about drearily following rules. Rather, its about feeling comfortable and at ease in any situation, and therefore being able to put others at their ease too. The aim is far from a tediously rigid formality, a glacial correctness or perfection. It is about running at life with a good heart and hoping to spread the joy, one (emailed) thank you note and cheerful dinner conversation at a time.

At home and abroad often together Kay and I have done the fieldwork, made the mistakes and committed enough embarrassing faux pas for two lifetimes, in the hope that you dont have to. We have honed our combined social wisdom into this guide to surviving modern life with your dignity intact, and perhaps having a bit (a lot) of fun along the way.

Ive always worked under the notion that manners are acts of kindness directed at strangers so that they will be nice in return. And I have done so for two reasons. First, different places have different mores, so manners are necessarily adaptable. And second, I figure they work on a fool me once, more fool you basis, to wit if Im nice to you and youre a dick in return, thats your problem.

Manners are a social lubricant. They allow us to rub along. And people seem to have forgotten this. Somewhere along the way, an idea crept into society that manners and politeness were somehow bourgeois and at odds with keeping it real. This is shiny, patent-leather bullshit. Manners need to be reclaimed for what they are: social interactions that improve our daily lives.

However, since they are adaptable, malleable things, it stands to reason that our manners are not quite the same as our parents manners. They are, as they should be, a little less formal, but still every bit as much a part of our everyday social transactions as ever they were.

(In using the word transaction, Im reminded of a sign I saw recently in a French caf. It read: Un caf 6; Un caf, sil vous plat 2,50; Bonjour, un caf, sil vous plat 1,20.)

This book will hopefully provide you with a toolkit for life and help you negotiate modern society with kindness, sass and a modicum of grace. Its a guide to whats acceptable, whats intolerable, and what sort of behaviour should see someone first up against the wall come the Manners Revolution. In short, it shows how manners maketh man. And woman.

MANNERS
ARE LOVE
IN A COOL
CLIMATE.

Quentin Crisp

Home is where the heart is, where we can be entirely ourselves: let it all hang out, do exactly what we want, live in a stretched-out band T-shirt, forget to brush our hair, take comfort in that armchair covered in a fine layer of dog hair, eat cereal for dinner and share a comb with the cat if we want to.

Well, sure. Of course. We all have days when the feral life feels like the best life, a resetting of batteries for all of those long days when we need to show our best faces to the world, temper our language and moderate our opinions. Home is like a spa break from civilisation.

But home is also where we learn how to be human. It is the testing ground for our public lives. Being thoughtful and kind at home prepares us for and inures us against a life where people arent necessarily always so wonderful. Good manners are the soft, downy padding we take out with us into the world.

It is a truism that we cant control anyones behaviour but our own. Knowing that, as far as humanly possible, you have behaved properly with kindness and thoughtfulness is a kindness to yourself. You never have to live with that gnawing feeling that you could have done better, tried harder. You did all you could and, if that wasnt enough, oh well, never mind, lets move along.

Home is where to practise this. Start with the ones who love you, or at least like you, and then work up to the annoying boss, irritating neighbour or aggravating person who keeps adding you to WhatsApp groups without asking (see ). Draw your boundaries at home first, then take them out into the world.

It is very important to emphasise that polite isnt a synonym for pushover. There is nothing more frustrating than feeling that you have been railroaded into something a party, a committee, a meeting, a family reunion because you were too polite to say no. Your heart will never be in it. Better to say no and give someone else a chance to enjoy the rubber chicken and bad coffee.

And while were here and have built up a little understanding, lets not pretend we are none of us ever just a little bit rude. Just make sure its on purpose. Accidentally causing offence is for amateurs. Rita Mae Brown, the American author of Rubyfruit Jungle wrote, You cant be truly rude until you understand good manners, and I think she has a point. When all else fails, a curt reply or a cold glance is worth a million conciliatory prevarications. Draw a line and move on. Some people enjoy a fight so dont give them the pleasure of your considered opinion. These sorts are invariably monsters anyway. (NB I say what I mean, mean what I say is usually the mark of the beast.)

Its also important to acknowledge that whats perceived as rudeness isnt always rudeness. Its sometimes just a woman with an opinion who is tired of your nonsense. Generally, men are given a lot of leeway and their curtness can be admired, seen as decisiveness, clarity, an admirable sense of purpose.

I was once on a press trip to South Africa where one of the other journalists was endlessly aggravating, scattering inappropriate and deeply personal questions about her like breadcrumbs for the birds. Press trips are oddly intimate things. You are thrown together with complete strangers from morning until night, often for days at a time, and the dynamics can be weird. One of our fellow travellers was quite magnificent. With every inappropriate question, she would simply glance at the other woman, pause for a beat and then cheerfully move on to another subject. It was a masterclass in composure and far more effective than being drawn into uncomfortable conversations. Since then, I have done this myself, but it requires nerves of steel and, I admit, I dont always have them. When that happens, I smile and say, Thats a little impertinent! in an I-am-joking-I-am-not-joking tone. It invariably does the trick.