The Lady Guide to Modern Manners: 23 May
Dear Thomas,
Have you heard that SNCF, the French rail company, is launching a new campaign to promote better manners in trains? After many unpleasant experiences on our own network, I wonder whether a similar initiative wouldn’t be welcome here?
Ursula Travers, Leeds
Dear Ursula,
Yes, I have heard of this new scheme. It’s called Voisins à bord or Neighbours Aboard. Much of it is perfectly reasonable and what you might hope would happen anyway: passengers are encouraged to assist young mothers with pushchairs and to help the elderly. I’m rather more doubtful that solitary travellers should feel obliged to move seats so that families can sit together, as recommended. Is this fair? Why didn’t the family buck up and reserve seats in advance? Is being alone a pathway to second-class citizenship? On the other hand, the lone traveller might wish to get away from the family.
SNCF also suggests that a person, presumably young, who is absorbed with an electronic device, should share whatever they are viewing with their unknown neighbour. I don’t get it. What are they doing wrong? Such a state of preoccupation is the ideal condition for these youths who might otherwise become disruptive.
If you travel on French trains, you’ve also got to fetch items from the buffet if you’re going there yourself. Your magazines, once read, must be handed round. But you’ll be pushed for time, because your principle duty is to be chatting to your voisins with charm and gusto.
This is crackpot. People get on trains in order to go somewhere, not to participate in a social event. For many, the pleasure is solitary – staring out of the window, cut off from the ‘real’ world, with the mind completely blank. Enforced conversation and complicated social obligations are not welcome. SNCF is missing the point, as well as confusing the promotion of better manners with social engineering. If they want their trains to be full of people wildly bonding to make the world a better place, they would do well to enter some other business.
The real bugbears of railway life are: loud voices, mobile phones, lewd comments, people eating smelly food, announcements made by train managers who are auditioning to replace Bruce Forsyth, inaudible announcements so crackly they’re painful to listen to, infuriating misuses such as ‘customers’ instead of ‘passengers’, and people who sit in first class and refuse to pay on the grounds that there’s nowhere else to sit. If SNCF or any other rail company could stamp out these practices they’d be getting somewhere.
Please send your questions to Thomas.blaikie@lady.co.uk or write to him at The Lady, 39-40 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ER
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you Americans never forgot a name. You always repeat it when first introduced.’
This was news to them. So we all went off not knowing each other’s names and I felt quite encouraged. Except it had lodged with me that one couple were Donna and Tony, until halfway through yesterday, when his name completely went. Cruisers wear name tags so there was some hope I would ‘refresh’. But when ‘Tony’ reappeared, he wasn’t wearing a name tag.
This morning ‘Tony’ suddenly came back to me but I didn’t dare address him thus. Then Donna mentioned that ‘Tony’ had told her you could ‘like’ the toilets at Wittenberg on Facebook. Oh, the correct name confirmed!
Meanwhile, round every corner, I’m greeted by Americans: ‘Hi, Thomas.’ So the moral is, a name can usually be recovered, but the American way is best.
Have you heard that SNCF, the French rail company, is launching a new campaign to promote better manners in trains? After many unpleasant experiences on our own network, I wonder whether a similar initiative wouldn’t be welcome here?
Ursula Travers, Leeds
Dear Ursula,
Yes, I have heard of this new scheme. It’s called Voisins à bord or Neighbours Aboard. Much of it is perfectly reasonable and what you might hope would happen anyway: passengers are encouraged to assist young mothers with pushchairs and to help the elderly. I’m rather more doubtful that solitary travellers should feel obliged to move seats so that families can sit together, as recommended. Is this fair? Why didn’t the family buck up and reserve seats in advance? Is being alone a pathway to second-class citizenship? On the other hand, the lone traveller might wish to get away from the family.
SNCF also suggests that a person, presumably young, who is absorbed with an electronic device, should share whatever they are viewing with their unknown neighbour. I don’t get it. What are they doing wrong? Such a state of preoccupation is the ideal condition for these youths who might otherwise become disruptive.
If you travel on French trains, you’ve also got to fetch items from the buffet if you’re going there yourself. Your magazines, once read, must be handed round. But you’ll be pushed for time, because your principle duty is to be chatting to your voisins with charm and gusto.
This is crackpot. People get on trains in order to go somewhere, not to participate in a social event. For many, the pleasure is solitary – staring out of the window, cut off from the ‘real’ world, with the mind completely blank. Enforced conversation and complicated social obligations are not welcome. SNCF is missing the point, as well as confusing the promotion of better manners with social engineering. If they want their trains to be full of people wildly bonding to make the world a better place, they would do well to enter some other business.
The real bugbears of railway life are: loud voices, mobile phones, lewd comments, people eating smelly food, announcements made by train managers who are auditioning to replace Bruce Forsyth, inaudible announcements so crackly they’re painful to listen to, infuriating misuses such as ‘customers’ instead of ‘passengers’, and people who sit in first class and refuse to pay on the grounds that there’s nowhere else to sit. If SNCF or any other rail company could stamp out these practices they’d be getting somewhere.
Please send your questions to Thomas.blaikie@lady.co.uk or write to him at The Lady, 39-40 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ER
WHAT TO DO ABOUT… FORGETTING NAMES
As I speak, I am river cruising in Germany with the wonderful Viking company. On the first night I sat with a group of Americans talking about how impossible it is to remember names.‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you Americans never forgot a name. You always repeat it when first introduced.’
This was news to them. So we all went off not knowing each other’s names and I felt quite encouraged. Except it had lodged with me that one couple were Donna and Tony, until halfway through yesterday, when his name completely went. Cruisers wear name tags so there was some hope I would ‘refresh’. But when ‘Tony’ reappeared, he wasn’t wearing a name tag.
This morning ‘Tony’ suddenly came back to me but I didn’t dare address him thus. Then Donna mentioned that ‘Tony’ had told her you could ‘like’ the toilets at Wittenberg on Facebook. Oh, the correct name confirmed!
Meanwhile, round every corner, I’m greeted by Americans: ‘Hi, Thomas.’ So the moral is, a name can usually be recovered, but the American way is best.