Forget 39 types of gentleman – just give meone rampant rotter!
AS A former editor of The Lady magazine, I’m still asked for my expert views on etiquette, which is hilarious as my husband once defined a lady as ‘everything that you are not’. Be that as it may, last week I looked down my long-handled lorgnette at a batty list called 39 Steps That Make A Modern Gent that appeared in Country Life.
First up, the magazine shouldn’t print the word ‘gent’ – it reeks of the public convenience – or ask readers to do a checklist to confirm their manly credentials.
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. If you have to do a quiz to determine whether or not you are a gentleman, you aren’t one – especially not in this list, that fails in every way to be an accurate field guide to the species.
Do we care if a man can ‘navigate airports with ease’, or ‘would not go to Puerto Rico’, knows his rook from his crow, or if he wears lilac socks? We do not.
Chaucer, in The Knight’s Tale, and the Victorian sage Cardinal Newman, in a long essay, made a far better fist of this question, with the latter stating: ‘It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain,’ and whose presence is like a log fire or an easy chair – it just makes things better.
TAKING them as our starting points, almost everything that Country Life tells us matters doesn’t, apart perhaps from numbers 24 (a gentleman never kisses and tells), 13 (he knows to break a relationship face to face) and 18 (he has two tricks to entertain children).
In fact, we can discard almost entirely the mag’s tweedy version of the real chap and his dexterity with doing things with one hand or one match (undoing bras and lighting bonfires).
So what does define a modern gentleman? I asked ‘H’, a ‘verray parfit gentil knyght’ of my acquaintance.
‘When he listens he is not waiting to speak about himself. He cries. He does not make passes at his friends’ wives,’ H replied. ‘He stays in touch with both parties after a divorce. He prefers never to lend money, but when he does he tells himself it is a gift. He’s never a snob. He realises that friends become tiresome and repetitive, but he puts up with them. They are the people he’s making the journey of life with, like the companions in an oldfashioned railway carriage…’
All good stuff, H. I would add: a gentlemen always puts women and children in the lifeboat first; doesn’t dye his hair, or wax, pierce or tattoo his body; he can do housework and say ‘tampon’; nothing and no one, is below his pay grade; and above all he is always kind, especially to animals, children, old people, taxi drivers, and waiters.
When I asked H if he followed all of his own ‘rules’– and I have included only a selection – he said hell no, which was as truthful as it was refreshing.
The editors of the rural magazine have come up with a male fantasy of the modern gentleman, not a female one, which brings us to the very nub of why their listicle is so useless.
It delineates a man you might want to bring home to mummy or go on a polar expedition with, but who does not make the pulse race.
‘As the world changes, so must our manners. Every woman loves a modern gentleman,’ claimed editor Mark Hedges.
NOT so. The reason the Bond franchise (sorry, I have to shoehorn the new film in somehow) works all over the world is because both sexes have a serious jones for a good, old-fashioned rotter. In Spectre, our hero murders a man, sleeps with his widow then scrams – ie he eats, shoots, and leaves. He even goes to a mountaintop spa and asks for the ‘toilet’.
Bond embodies the opposite of Cardinal Newman’s gentleman. He is the antithesis of it. He hurts and maims, he is licensed to thrill and kill – and we would always fall for him, even though he’s so not ‘husband material’.
Finally, do not fret if you, too, fumbled and failed every one of the 39 Steps.
Take it from me. Step 40 should be: ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes, or should at least try to pretend they do. But blondes don’t always prefer gentlemen.’
WE CAN all live without the occasional hot dog. But bacon is an essential. The news that smoked, salted and cured red meats are as carcinogenic as arsenic and smoking has flattened the family. We can only pray for another survey to contradict the last one, and save our bacon.
I TOO thought that the Duchess of Cambridge looked thin in her ice-blue gown at the Bond premiere, but not too thin, and she was radiant in her floral Erdem number at the 100 Women In Hedge Funds gala dinner (a gold-plated date in her diary, no doubt). Far more importantly, I thought that she looked sparkly and happy. I hope she doesn’t read the sour emissions of jealous observers who judged that she looked gaunt in her dress of soft furnishing fabrics. If I were queen, it would be curtains for the lot of them.