Manners melteth the chill ice of selfishness
LAST Train From Wemyss Bay sounds like a film the great John Ford could have directed with John Wayne as the leading man, but it was just my commute to work as the Beast from the East struck.
Ford would have filled the screen with the station supervisor’s face. ‘Ticket, sonny?’ Sucks teeth. ‘You know this is…’ Hard stare. ‘The Last Train From Wemyss Bay?’ Cue orchestral crescendo on the soundtrack.
The Beast was not just ‘Hysteria from Siberia’ as one complacent journalist wrote from the safety of his toasty office on Buckingham Palace Road in London before a single snowflake wafted down.
I boarded that train out of the Bay – and got as far as Paisley, where we sat for an hour. The driver got on the intercom; the ticket collector got on the phone to ScotRail HQ. ‘I’m on the train…’
I got off, Googling how long it would take me to walk to work (seven miles; two-and-a-half hours).
Despite it all, doughty taxi drivers were still moving, so I joined a queue. The first four people selfishly took a cab apiece. I looked a right eejit doing a move called the Screaming Eagle, all flapping arms and bendy legs, to fight the cold while I waited. But it was designed by the Royal Marine Mountain & Arctic Warfare Cadre to keep them fighting fit in Polar climes, so…
When my turn finally came, I shouted to the queue: ‘Who’s going to Glasgow?’ Hands went up. ‘Hop in!’ Well, it was only good manners.
But things have changed since William Horman (1440-1535), one-time headmaster at Eton, gave us the ‘Manners maketh the man’ aphorism.
Such is western civilisation’s decline, the Urban Dictionary now incorrectly credits the line to Kingsman, a forgettable 2015 movie, and Horman would scarcely recognise the ‘Me first and deil tak’ the hindmost’ society exemplified by those at the head of that taxi queue.
Yet there is hope amid the barbarous times we endure.
Robin Vettier is a student who took part-time work in supermarkets in Edinburgh and his native Fontainebleau.
He reports politeness from the denizens of Auld Reekie, while in France: ‘People have lost all notions of respect.’
HE had a rucksack aimed at his head, was called an ‘illiterate moron’ and nearly lost his shins to a baby carriage used as a battering ram. So, we may not be leading the race to the bottom in manners and we better hope that’s not just cold comfort. For a report says children rated as polite in primary school go on to do better academically and so earn more in later life.
All that standing up to chant ‘Good morning, Mr McLean!’ when my primary head walked into the classroom maybe wasn’t wasted after all. And I bet the well-mannered chap who insisted he would pay when we got to Glasgow after I marshalled everyone into that cab was schooled the same way.
A mannerly gesture that fair melted my heart amid the snow.