Why we can’t let Covid kill off the handshake
Ihave had an awkward relationship with the handshake over the years. As a Boy Scout, much of my early handshaking was done with the left hand (as is Scout tradition), leading to derision when I unthinkingly proffered my left hand outside scouting circles. Then there is the terror of having your hand crushed by overzealous shakers, or, even worse, receiving one of those limp handshakes that feel like you have got your hand round an expiring fish in its final pathetic throes; or the fear of falling short as a shaker oneself.
I am not alone – apparently 70 per cent of people in the UK are not confident about their hand-shaking technique – but Ella Al-Shamahi insists that we’re overthinking it. “The handshake is not the end game. Human connection is.”
Al-Shamahi – a palaeoanthropologist by day and a stand-up comedian by night – is a handshake proselytiser. This book is an act of defiance against those, such as Anthony Fauci, the US chief medical adviser, who have called for it to be consigned to the dustbin of history as unhygienic.
She emphasises the symbolic importance of such moments as Princess Diana shaking hands with Aids patients, and scorns the World Health Organisation’s favoured alternative, the elbow bump. Although she has a soft spot for the penis handshake of the Australian Walbiri tribe, she concludes that nothing beats the traditional handshake as a mark of belief in equality (remember Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, insisting on shaking hands with Richard II?) and mutual respect.
Nobody is more zealous than a convert, and Al-Shamahi’s passion stems from her having been forbidden to shake hands for much of her life. In accordance with strict Muslim law, she avoided physical contact with men for many years – during “what I affectionately call my fundamentalist period” – but found that alternatives such as saluting
The author has the zeal of a convert – when she was a strict Muslim, she could not shake hands with men
didn’t cut the mustard. Having become more secular in her thinking in recent years, she has been able to discover the handshake’s merits.
“I cherish that easy bond between all humans,” she writes. “To be tactile, I would argue, is the best way to build a connection. Touch unites us in a way that keeping our distance can’t bridge.”
Her book busts a few myths about the handshake – notably the prevalent idea that it began as a way of proving to a stranger that you had no weapon in your hand – and insists that it was not introduced to the world by Western missionaries or invented by the ancient Greeks. “Starting at any of these points in time is akin to beginning a history of pop music at the Cheeky Girls; you missed a bit”.
Instead, she argues, shaking hands is not “a learnt cultural tradition” but “something deeply biological in origin”; it is, after all, also practised by our near relative, the chimp. There’s a quick whizz through the science, with explanations of how shaking hands stimulates the nucleus accumbens and other reward-giving parts of the brain.
The bulk of the book, however, deals with the symbolic and cultural functions of the handshake. Early recorded examples include paintings showing Cepheus shaking hands with Perseus after he rescued his daughter Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus: “This is the handshake as a gesture of approval, endorsement, a cousin not far removed of Paul Hollywood’s prized ‘Hollywood handshake’, used by the Great British Bake Off star to commend an especially delectable bake.” (Incidentally, I note from this week’s episode that Hollywood still doles out his handshake in defiance of social distancing guidelines; is it deemed so important to the nation’s spirits that he’s been given an official exemption?)
Al-Shamahi does admit, though, that handshakes can go awry, and duly provides an amusing anthology of their doing so, from the poor old Taoiseach Enda Kenny humiliatingly flapping his hand at an oblivious Barack Obama, to the assassination of the US president William McKinley, whose insistence on meeting and greeting the public made him an easy target. Oddly enough, she doesn’t mention Robert Mugabe, who was always gleefully hustling people – Prince Charles and Jack Straw among them – into shaking hands with him at busy gatherings before they had a chance to realise who he was; the fuss this caused attests to the symbolic power attached to the handshake.
Will it return? Handshaking often disappears during epidemics – “the old custom of shaking hands fell in such general disuse, that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of a hand,” William Carey observed during the US yellow fever outbreak of 1793, and you can have a lot of fun trying the same thing on passers-by today – but it has always bounced back.
Having not particularly missed shaking hands over the past year, I ended this very engaging little book so desperate to get started again that I’m in danger of becoming a super-spreader. When I start meeting people again I’m going to be constantly batting my right arm down with my left, Strangelove style.
Al-Shamahi might have spared a thought, however, for the malign consequences on those who are condemned to a lifetime of excessive shaking, such as the Royal family; Prince Philip has blamed too much hand-shaking for exacerbating the arthritis in his wrists. Perhaps the respite from shaking hands means that the Royals will have at least one reason to look back over this past year with some nostalgia.