Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners

Some older people may not look it but they may still need your seat (if carrying a lot of shopping, generally appearing at the end of their tether etc.). Give it to them.

Don’t let anxiety that they will feel insulted (‘Do I look that old?’) hold you back.

If you think a woman might be pregnant, give her your seat. If you’ve made a mistake, it won’t matter. After all, she’ll never know why you gave up your seat, and if she’s got any sense she’ll be glad to get one even if slightly insulted.

If you badly need a seat and nobody is offering, ask. Of course it would be nicer to be offered, but at least, if the results of that experiment are anything to go by, you’re quite certain of success.

On the whole we should give up our seats more often.

Are children never to give up their seats on public transport? They should not be pitched out, old-style, just because they are children. But if an entire family is seated and an elderly person is standing, does it not make sense for one of the children to relinquish its seat? Being smaller and younger, are they not better suited to standing? Can’t very small children share? Isn’t this often what they are doing anyway? Or running around not even occupying ‘their’ seats?

Not satisfied

Mrs Gibbs went once with her nephew to Sorrento. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t like his room in the hotel so he asked for another. I’d never have dared.’ This is the traditional British ‘don’t make a fuss’ approach taken to extremes. But Matt, almost half Mrs Gibbs’s age, isn’t much better. ‘I don’t like complaining,’ he says. He tells a story of getting one of those bargain first class deals on Eurostar and a ‘ludicrous woman’ who made a terrible fuss because the attendant allowed someone to sit in her seat while she was in the bar. ‘She was away for hours and everyone thought she’d got off. When she came back the person gave her her seat back immediately but still she had to complain. She kept on saying over and over again, “It’s not what you expect in first class.” The whole point was to tell everyone that she was in first class but we all knew that because we were there too. My wife Lucy thought it was very funny but I wished the woman would belt up.’

Zoe, on the other hand, is an unhesitant complainer and really rather good at it.

If you have reason to be dissatisfied, you should complain. You are paying after all.

If you complain in a public place, such as a hotel lobby, a railway carriage or a restaurant, you will almost certainly have an audience although you might not know it. People nearby will be listening in.

For this reason a lot of people take a huge amount of trouble – staging their complaints as if they were giving a presentation at work or reprimanding an employee in the modern manner, i.e. constructively, with huge emphasis on the positive, suggestions for the future etc. On the whole this is a good thing, but be careful you’re not making a mountain out of a molehill. There’s no need to spend ten elaborate minutes going through all the strong points of your hotel room as a prelude to asking if the bedside lamp could be fixed.

Tipping

‘Why do we have to have tipping?’ says Zoe, for whom the occasional taxi is quite expensive enough. She’s right, of course. It’s patronising and drives everyone into a frenzy of indignation and anxiety – who to tip? How much? Why?

In theory, a tip is given for personal services beyond the call of duty. It is supposed to be freely given. In practice, punters compensate for meagre salaries and if they don’t they’re punished in ways too terrifying to think about.

Tipping gives unfair advantages. Very rich people ensure good service by wisely distributing £50 notes on arrival in hotels and restaurants.

There is no rationale to tipping. You wouldn’t think of tipping the person at Tesco’s who helps you find the frozen peas.

The whole thing stinks. In Iceland tipping is outlawed.

But we are lumbered with it.

Black-cab drivers in London are tipped 10 per cent – a practice which should have been discontinued long ago. They earn good money. They don’t need a tip.

The custom of tipping has never taken root in the minicab world. You agree a price at the start of the journey and that’s it. Don’t for goodness’ sake start tipping minicab drivers.

Restaurants usually add a 12.5 per cent service charge. This isn’t a tip but an extra charge although you can withhold it. Only do this if you are absolutely sure the poor service was the waiter’s fault. Most people feel sorry for waiters since they are poorly paid.

If you pay the service charge it is not necessary to leave any further tip.

Some people tip hairdressers. This is absurd. Nowadays hairdressers are glamorous professionals. You wouldn’t tip your child’s teacher or your lawyer, so why tip the hairdresser?

Porters in hotels have to be tipped for carrying your suitcases to your room – annoying when you have just arrived and only have a 100-euro note. The usual tip is a couple of pounds or euros.

If someone has provided really exceptional service over a long period (a waiter, hotel staff, a coach driver or builder perhaps), it would be far more personal and less patronising to give them a present. At one time ‘grateful patients’ used to give their doctors expensive presents. Lawyers too would often get cases of wine or cigars. But now everybody hates doctors and lawyers. If you were really grateful, you could lavish something choice upon them (see – Presents: It’s the thought that counts, page 222).

At the leisure centre or gym

Mrs Gibbs gave up the public swimming pool in her midseventies because she was afraid of being mown down in the water. Matt and Zoe are both dilatory attenders at gyms. Matt only goes when he has to stay down in London for the evening for some reason; otherwise he is rushing back to his wife and children in Peterborough. Besides, he complains that his gym is full of ‘rather aggressive types’. We know what he means: usually men, scowling, banging away at the machines, breathing in and out in a noisy and conspicuously efficient way, allowing others to have a go with bad grace. Some of them never put the free weights back in the right place and, sweating being a proud feature, leave horrible sweat patches all over the machines. At Zoe’s council-run gym, women-only evenings have been introduced to counteract this problem. Not that this entirely suits her, since she sees the gym as a good opportunity to meet men and indeed has come across a number of boyfriends in this way.

Gyms and swimming pools are social places; many of them are indeed clubs.

If your idea is to be ‘totally focused’ on your own fitness programme and to resent any ‘distractions’, perhaps you should take up some solitary form of exercise such as round-the-world yachting.

It is not unreasonable to assume that members of the same gym will smile at each other and exchange the odd friendly word.

Allow others to use a machine while you rest between sets – this is called ‘working in’.

Don’t ‘reserve’ a machine by putting a towel on the seat before wandering off for a prolonged chat with someone on the other side of the room.

Put equipment back in the right place and wipe down machines after you’ve used them.

A great deal of ‘picking up’ and ‘chatting up’ goes on in gyms (as it does in libraries). Disapproving of this is priggish and pointless – what else would anyone expect when a lot of youngish people with few clothes on are working up a sweat together?

If you have to turn somebody down, try to nice about it (see Chatting up, dating, turning down, page 186).

A gym is one of the few places where straight men may gaze at themselves in the mirror without risk of being mistaken for gay – not that gay men would ever waste time in that way, of course.

Drunkenness

We hear a lot about binge drinking and most of it is true. Pleasant cathedral cities, such as St Albans and Winchester, turn into hellholes on Friday and Saturday nights. Even Mrs Gibbs, eighty-five, is fully clued up. ‘I have a friend who lives next to a camping barn in Devon. Once it was occupied by some lawyers – all men – who were so drunk they threw all the furniture and things like the microwave into the river. Another time it was some young people who’d just finished their A levels. They ended up on the roof hurling abuse.’

There is much debate about whether all this isn’t just traditional British behaviour and nothing to make a fuss about. Traditional or not, it isn’t very nice. In its present form, drunkenness seems to be no respecter of class. Matt complains that his train home to Peterborough is frequently stopped for drunks to be expelled: ‘You see some City type in a suit out of his mind on the platform.’ Aggression and violence also are new features. The pre-war days of Bertie Wooster and Gussie Finknottle getting rather squiffy and stealing policemen’s helmets have gone for good. Even Zoe, many of whose friends are up for the Friday-night blow-out, has noticed it. ‘Last New Year’s Eve I had to walk home most of the way to Balham from the West End. The only people I saw were blind drunk. Every single one of them was either weeping hysterically, shouting really aggressively at the bouncers outside a pub or club, or they were couples having horrible rows.’

Or the severely inebriated person ends up alone – like Euan Blair, lying abandoned by his mates in the gutter. But encountering the Prime Minister across the table in the police station later is not usually part of the experience.

For the sake of others, don’t get blind drunk.

Mobile phones in public places

Mrs Gibbs, travelling on a train (first class at a knock-down pensioner rate), complained of a young man ‘bellowing into a phone for nearly an hour, trying to book a hotel room in Finland’.

On buses, on trains, in shops, everywhere, mobile phones are a nuisance, aren’t they? It isn’t just the ring tones – why are all of them silly? – it’s the sword clash of different conversations conducted at full volume: while one person is blaring away about last night’s sex, another is having a huge set-to with their insurance company about a minor car accident, and a third is nit-picking their way through the discounts on offer from Thomas Cook – ‘If we go out on the third and return on the fourteenth…but how about going out on the fifth and coming back on the twelfth?’ etc. The solution is easy – so why has no one thought of it?

YOU DON’T NEED TO SHOUT. When phones were first invented people thought they had to shout into them, since the people they were talking to were far away. But, after almost 130 years, we ought to know better.

As for nightmare ring tones, whatever happened to ‘vibrating alert’? No phone needs to ring in a public place. So why do they? It’s this frenzied anxiety, again, isn’t it? My wife might be calling to announce that she’s planning a quiche for supper or it might be one of the children demanding to know why there are no more Skittles. IT CAN WAIT.

It really is impolite to be on the phone while paying for things in shops. Calm down. One thing at a time. Make your call quietly in a corner, then pay. Don’t be in such a hurry. If the phone rings while you are paying, ignore it. You are dealing with the person on the till. That comes first.

Witnesses to the above should apologise loudly to the shop worker on the rude person’s behalf.

Mobile mobile phone users (as it were) are always in the way. Walking along the pavement, getting off a train and so on, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. These people should be tucked away behind pillars, seated in designated seating areas; they should be OUT OF THE WAY. Why aren’t they?