The Side-Eye on envying bad manners

You know you’re getting old when you start noticing, then internally criticising and then loudly harrumphing at public displays of bad manners. Spitting (especially now), really? Playing crapping techno from your crappy phone speaker on the DART or manspreading across the only empty seat on the bus, taking up the whole pavement with your gaggle of friends – who doesn’t feel their teeth setting on edge when they witness such micro-aggressions? Yet I always feel something else too – a tiny but burning sense of envy that others can continue to live unconsumed by shame after behaving in a way that I simply could not. When it comes to skirting the conventions of polite society, I am like a diver frozen on the high board. There’s just no way I can jump.

One of the reasons – let’s call it the major one, otherwise the Oscar was a guarantee – that I am not a professional actor was overhearing the details of a task that some drama students had to undertake in the name of research. They had to deliberately engage in some sort of mildly antisocial or otherwise unseemly behaviour in a public place; think jumping the queue at the checkout, refusing to give up their seat on the train for an old lady, burping and farting in the doctor’s waiting room.

Apparently the objective of this bizarre exercise was to help these would-be thespians study the impact of their behaviour, the better to recreate a sociopath on the big screen or play a baddie on Fair City. The prospect of this fills me with such horror and fear that I can confidently say that if you see me pushing in front of you in the long line for a Teddy’s 99, then you should call the police because I’m surely acting against my will and this is a hostage situation.

Having such a Pavlovian aversion to being publicly non-conforming has its downsides of course. That weirdo with the halitosis at the party, I’ll practically make a beeline for them, an invisible hand in the small of my back propelling me forward and an insistent voice in my ear telling me God Love Them, Sure Just Go Over and Chat. I’ve signed up for mini-marathons because it would have been socially awkward to get out of the obligation, then feigned two broken legs to extricate myself. If you’d like me to buy a line, sponsor your extreme haircut or buy a goat for a poor family in Mali, I’ll be there with my pen out and a rictus grin on my face. Tricky table planning situation? Count me in to sit beside Uncle Handsy or Aunty Holy Relics. I’d love to, of course.

In a small way, it’s probably like being a member of the Royal family. Decades of politeness and social niceties presumably calcify your inner rebel at some point. Deep inside, there’s a tiny burning desire to wear a skirt that goes above mid-calf and to tell the little flower-offerers that you’re not interested in their manky bunch of daisies. But for us terminally well-mannered types, the pull of the please-and-thank-you is too strong. I’d love to take a pack of biscuits off the shelf and munch through them, scattering crumbs as I wander around the supermarket. I have dark fantasies of refusing to be on the PTA or admitting to the inlaws that I really, really hate summer pudding. One of these days, I’ll come clean to my husband about the special listening noises that I make when he’s in full conversational flow about the engine problems his car suffers. Then again, I probably won’t. Because that would be bad manners, wouldn’t it?

Jennifer Coyle, July 2020.