I bet those Gen-Zers couldn’t tell you why a right-handed gentleman should always sleep on the left side of the bed...

Adults’ instructions echo down the years from my childhood: ‘ sit up straight! Elbows off the table! stop playing with your food! don’t speak with your mouth full! Hold your knife and fork properly! don’t slurp your drink! Wait until everyone has finished before you ask for more!’

like every child through the ages, I found these rules extremely irksome as I was growing up — and I confess that, at 70, I don’t always abide by every one of them when it’s just the two of us at the table.

When Mrs u and I are eating alone, I’ve been known to rest on my elbows and help myself to seconds before she’s finished. Occasionally, I also break more modern rules of etiquette by, say, checking my text messages and emails while we’re eating (smartphones didn’t exist when I was growing up, or they would most definitely have been banned at the table).

You may even catch me, horror of horrors!, lighting a cigarette between courses when we’re alone. this is a vice I inherited from my late father, who always indulged in what he called his ‘intercourse cigarette’ — a little joke he never failed to find funny, even after years of repetition.

Elbows

But when we have guests, or others invite us to dine with them, I wouldn’t dream of behaving like this. like most of my generation, I do my best to follow the old rules.

If we’re to believe a poll out this week, however, old-fashioned table manners will soon be consigned to history. A survey of 2,000 teenagers and adults found that 60 per cent of those aged 12 to 27 — known as Generation Z — think table manners in general are no longer important.

More than three- quarters of them, finds Censuswide, say they don’t care about elbows on the table, while more than half think it doesn’t matter which way round a knife and fork are held.

Now, I know from having brought up four boys that a great many in this age group, left to their own devices, would slump on the floor in front of the telly, eating takeaway pizzas with their fingers, rather than sitting down at a table with cutlery.

But then Gen Z seems to be far from alone in thinking table manners have had their day, since the survey found that 54 per cent of Britons of all ages say they are a ‘thing of the past’.

I can’t help feeling that, if this is true, we risk throwing away something very precious. For don’t table manners, like so many time-honoured conventions on social interaction, boil down simply to courtesy and consideration for others?

take the elbows rule. surely, the idea is simply that we shouldn’t make those sitting next to us feel uncomfortable by erecting a barrier between us or invading their space, like those antisocial men who sit on the tube or the bus with their legs spread wide apart.

the same goes for sitting up straight, rather than slouching or tipping back on our chairs. It’s a straightforward courtesy to our hosts, who may have gone to a great deal of trouble to prepare and cook our meal, not to approach their hospitality too casually.

As for being careful not to speak with our mouths full, bolt our food or make noises like pigs at the trough, well, there are simple enough reasons for those rules, too: a great many people find such behaviour disgusting, and it puts them off their food. that’s quite apart from the danger of having half-chewed morsels spattered all over us.

Indeed, I have a friend who no longer invites one of his oldest mates to eat with him because he finds his table manners so revolting.

Meanwhile, some people are so sensitive to the slightest sound of eating, apparently, that the lilian Baylis studio, sadler’s Wells, has issued a ‘ trigger warning’ for this month’s production of an entertainment called Out (‘ reclaiming dancehall and celebrating queerness amongst the bittersweet scent of oranges’, if you’re interested).

Guzzling

this tells audience members with misophonia — an extreme emotional reaction to sounds — that they may ‘find some parts uncomfortable’, since oranges are eaten on stage!

Well, I wouldn’t go that far myself ( unless, perhaps, I were courting publicity for a dire- sounding production). But we’ve all come across people whose guzzling and slurping make it hard for us to swallow another mouthful.

Yes, of course fashions in manners change, from age to age and country to country. After all, the toffs of Ancient Rome used to loll on couches as they dined, tudor nobles ate with knives and fingers, thinking forks were strictly for namby-pamby foreigners, while in some societies today, it’s seen as the height of good manners to belch loudly at the table, in appreciation of one’s grub.

so I accept that the rules are not set in stone — and nor do I think that they should be.

In particular, I won’t be sorry to see an end to the widespread, snobbish belief that there’s a right and a wrong way to hold a knife (‘I can still hear my late grandmother’s voice declaring, lady Bracknell-like: ‘My dear, Mr so-and-so holds his knife like a pencil!’)

After all, it’s the very opposite of good manners to make others feel awkward or ill-at-ease.

Nor will I mourn the passing of other old conventions, still practised by sticklers. For example, it has long seemed wrong to me that we’re all supposed to wait until everyone has been served before tucking in. this means that those who are served first just have to sit there, while their food gets cold in front of them — something that’s especially unfair on women, in those households where the ladies are always served before the men.

Rulebook

No matter how much we implore our guests to start while their food is hot, many find they simply can’t eat until everyone else has food.

In the same illogical way, I can’t sleep on the right-hand side of the bed, as you look towards the feet, having been brought up to believe that a righthanded gentleman always sleeps on the left, so as to keep his sword-arm free to fight off intruders in the night without leaning over his lady.

I also feel terribly uncomfortable when I’m walking down the street with a woman, unless I’m on the ‘carriage side’ of her, nearest the road. As older readers will know, this rule dates from the days when the roads were awash with excrement, both equine and human, and it was considered a gentleman’s duty to bear the brunt of the splashes when a carriage drove past.

true, the water companies seem to be doing their level best to make this one relevant again. But I can’t see such arcane conventions surviving for much longer, and I won’t pretend I’m sorry about that.

But, oh, what a mistake it would be to tear up the rulebook altogether, whether in the bedroom, at the table or in any other sphere of life.

In this age of the litter lout, the road hog, the internet troll, the pavement cyclist and the yobs who refuse to give up their seats to frail old ladies on the bus, wouldn’t a revival of some of the old courtesies cheer us all up?