the times | Monday June 29 2020 1GM 23Comment
An etiquette guide for our post-Covid era
Debrett’s guidance for the social niceties of a pandemic will feed the endearing British anxiety about “right” behaviour
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826coast beaches, seems to have held up
remarkably well as part of the
general public-spirited obedience.
City friends say it’s fraying now.
And any corona-sensitive advice
should return to old-fashioned
gentlemanliness and enjoin the idly
furloughed or workers-from-home to
show extreme respect to weary key
workers in hospitals, shops, vans or
call centres, like Americans saying
‘thank you for your service” to the
military. And as hospitality reopens,
the inability to tip in contactless
deals is an ongoing misery to the
properly raised.
Every social change challenges
the rules of manners. Take working
from home: what etiquette covers
interruption by phone or doorstep
of someone deep in an online
conference? And there’s Zoom itself.
Should chaps be in ties, and
breakfast crockery hidden? Are hats
permissible in mixed online
company? When discussing a
wedding date with a vicar, rabbi or
imam, should a lady cover her
sun-bared arms and cleavage, even
onscreen? In an online game, does
spotting repeated glances away from
the camera justify an accusation of
cheating-by-Wikipedia? And does
the fist-chewing boredom of
lockdown justify being filthy rude to
strangers on Twitter? Add your own
precepts. Manners makyth Man.with the mass return of city
second-homers. Unlike the first
wave, who locked down alongside
the locals in mid-March, some stride
into the village shop without seeing
the “three at a time” notice and
barge around undistanced in the pub
takeaway queue braying “We didn’t
order, but three more fish and chips,
two gluten-free”.
That brings us, before next
weekend’s stayaway permission, to
the delicate question of “calling out”
rulebreakers, a very un-Debrett’s
practice. Local websites across the
country report fearful or downright
hostile attitudes to city visitors
(“Respect us, don’t infect us” cried
the plastic banners). Some places are
seriously unpleasant, others have the
sense to observe a tight-lipped
omerta by not actually saying “nice
to see you again” to a regular
holidaytime neighbour but not
actually cussing them to their face. It
helps if the outsider in turn displays
an apologetically furtive middle-class
demeanour, a traditional British
talent that now may need refresher
courses. Then, of course, there is the
question of whether it is rude for an
illicit holiday-homer to hit the
website with a blanket accusation
that the whole town is giving them
nasty looks.
What else? Queueing, beyond the
rebellious walrus colonies on southpermitted quota to a barbecue how
do you ask whether sitting a mere
metre apart at a table will do? If
you’re a guest, will observing
government advice and bringing
your own chair, plates and cutlery be
considered polite or downright
loony? And if you suddenly find out
that your friends’ resident children
took the Tube to a BLM demo, are
you entitled to refuse an invitation
you previously accepted, thus
classifying them all as lepers? Oh,
and when was it ever permissiblefor offspring to order rebellious
septuagenarians indoors ‘for their
own good’?
Among strangers some things are
simple, at least for five more days of
the two-metre rule. Footpaths round
here see exemplary distancing
chivalry: in head-on meetings the
more robust party dives politely into
the gorse bushes or slithers down the
riverbank. Debrett’s should be proud,
especially when both swerve at once
and execute a heartwarmingly
British after-you-Alphonse dance in
the bracken. The gradual breakdown
of this civility has, alas, coincidedI
n a crisis of global scale, what is
more reassuring than something
quintessentially British: an
etiquette guide? Few now care
about how to introduce a
marquess to an archimandrite, or
whether to address the
vice-chancellor of Oxford as “The
Right Worshipful” when disagreeing
about Cecil Rhodes. Real toffs either
know that stuff or don’t care.
Radicals want all conventions on the
bonfire. But the vast middle class is
haunted by an understated
nightmare: are we accidentally being
rude, common, chavvy, showing
ourselves up? Within us always lurks
the spirit of Alan Bennett’s mum in a
posh hotel, or Mr Salteena fearing he
is Not Quite A Gentleman. Most of
us have glanced shamefacedly at
least once at a guide to manners.
So, a bit late on cue, up steps
Debrett’s, founded 1769. Its
forthcoming post-coronavirus
edition promises guidance on mask
etiquette (smile under it, use friendlybody language, don’t mumble).
Future hints cover paper plates and
hand towels. Being told how to
behave by kindly posh voices might
even suit the national temperament
better than a ministerial “this is not a
request, it is an instruction”.
Naturally, corona-quette keeps
changing. Few now remember the
carefree days of elbow bumps now
that a two-metre “namaste” is the
best available (even if it’s un-woke
cultural appropriation). Permissions
evolve kaleidoscopically: meeting in
parks, then gardens; keeping on the
move, then suddenly permitted to sit;
confining distanced meetings to one
person, then six. Now we face the
angst of entering the long-forbidden
interiors of other people’s homes,
the perilous choosing of “bubbles”
and, with pub reopenings. the
viral solecism of handing a pint glass
to a pal.
Anthropologists will work out
what our solutions reveal about
21st-century Britain. A core problem,
as society reopens, is how you can
politely enquire which rules the
other party is keeping. Everyone has
diverged at some point: maybe
exercising twice a day, recklessly
conversing with multiple
acquaintances in the shop queue, or
pretending the sunroom is outdoors
because your bifold doors are open.
So now if you invite yourFew now remember
the carefree days of
elbow bumps
Libby Purves
@lib_thinks