Polite's the point!

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I weaponize politeness.

I’ve always been, so I’ve been told, ‘charmingly polite’.  But that simple statement begs lots of questions.  Is ‘charm’ something that is part of authentic ‘niceness’ or is it something which is much more self-aware and knowing?  Is ‘charm’ a spontaneous emanation of the warm parts of one’s soul or the calculating approach to get what you want?  Or, indeed, neither of these things.  I do remember from my teaching days that I always used to promote politeness as a sure-fire way of getting what you want with the least amount of effort.  And I was able to adduce example after example of what came my way through the soft power of simply being nice.

And what, after all, is politeness?  The following an age-old code of proper behaviour facilitating human interaction, or a hypocritical façade allowing cynical manipulation?

To which the proper answer is, I think, “Yes!”

The way that I was brought up followed a fairly conventional lower middle class professional path.  As teachers, my parents had a highly developed sense of responsibility and inculcated in me a series of ethical standards that were firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian-British-Welsh-Tidy-Proper approach to human living.  This in spite of the fact that at least 50% of my parental influence (i.e. my dad) was more geared towards the robustly atheistic and cynically socialist way of life.  The actual basis of my mother’s Anglican (Church in Wales) faith, I never really discovered, and when I was old enough to engage in theological discussion with her I never really came out victoriously.  Well, she was, after all, my mother and did not hesitate to use the most underhand maternal pressures that mere biblical and theological argument merely brushed against!

 

But some ethical principles were set in stone:

1              A lady never picks up her own dropped glove, it is the duty of the man (or boy) to return it to her.

2              A man (or boy) walks on the outside of the pavement, next to the road when with a lady.

3              A gentleman tips his soup bowl away from himself and eats (not ‘drinks’) his soup from the side of the spoon.

4              Civilized people push uneaten food to the right side of the plate and place the knife and fork, parallel to each other and at 90 degrees to the person, on the right side of the plate too.

5              CPs do not scrape the knife and fork on the surface of the plate.

6              CPs should obey the more reasonable of the 10 Commandments as far as possible.

7              When taking Communion, you should take the cup from the hands of the vicar and drink from it yourself.

8              When reciting the Creed you should remain standing when the rest of the congregation (though excess of Popery) kneels during certain phrases.

9              The yellow Labrador bitch is the best dog that there is and, while other dogs (NOT CATS) might be cute, they are not YLBs and should be treated as lower life forms.

10          “Fair play is bonny play.”

11          “Never refuse a good offer.”

12          China, cutlery and glass are important: always buy quality.

13          Always clean your shoes.

14          Don’t bite your nails.

15          Pronounce ‘trait’ in the correct, French way and not by sounding the ‘t’.

16          “Anything is better than nothing.”

17          Keep coloured clothes from white clothes in the wash.

18          Close the door.

19          Always say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me”.

20          Have a cup of tea and offer a cup of tea on all possible occasions.

I have just read through those 20 rules or suggestions or thoughts and have realised that a great deal of my life is encapsulated therein!

Anyway, to get back (almost) to the point.  I have been brought up to be polite and reasonable and charming, and it either fits the character that I have, or that character has been formed by the way in which I have been raised.  Whatever, the truth (if such a thing exists) I am (as Popeye said) what I am - and that’s the way I roll.

So why does all this come to mind on this Saturday afternoon? 

Well, we have just had lunch in our usual watering hole and I had the worst meal that I have ever had in the restaurant.  My spaghetti first course was over salted, the spaghetti was nastily al dente and the sauce was bland.  My second course was of over-cooked tasteless cod with a clam sauce in which most of the clams were shut-shell dead.  The orange I had for dessert was sort-of OK.  I had rebelled against the god-awful house wine and bought a more expensive (for Spain) bottle that was the best part of the meal!  And did I say a word about this?  No I did not - except of course to Toni who had had a menu plate of pork loin and half-and-half salad and chips that he enjoyed.

I mean, let’s face it: the meal was not free, I paid for it.  It was, you might say, a service.  And it wasn’t good.  And I said nothing.  I even had to pay for the upgrade on the wine!  So why didn’t I optimize my opening sentence and say something in the nicest way possible to show that I was not happy?

It probably comes down to cowardice and an attitude that could probably be properly added as number 21 to the list above: “Put it down to experience and get on with it.”

Because, one of my Great Life Lessons was discovering that people actually listen to what you say in a sequential way.  So, if you say one thing and then say another, people tend to put the two statements next to each other rather than regarding them as separate utterances.  So, no matter how polite you are about voicing an opinion about the saltiness of food in a dish in your regular restaurant, it will not be regarded as a one-off, only of relevance to the dish in question (no matter how reasonable such an assumption might be) but rather as a negative which calls into question any previous positive there might have been.

There are exceptions.  One time in Le Monde in Cardiff, I ordered a vegetable soup.  It came and one sip told me it was impossibly salty.  I took another sip to confirm my taste and, behold, it was so!  Unfortunately we were sitting next to the open kitchen and the chef who prepared my soup was within ladle smashing distance.  But I simply couldn’t drink the soup.  So, talking my courage in both hands I timidly called the waiter and intimated that there was a trifle more salt in the soup than I could handle.  The dish was taken away and returned to the chef who immediately took a spoon and tasted the soup for himself.

One taste later, the chef asked me if it was my dish, agreed that it was undrinkable and asked me to choose what I wanted from the menu - he suggested the much more expensive king prawns which I thought was a jolly good idea.  They were delicious, I was delighted and I have not stopped going to Le Monde and would recommend the place to anyone looking for decent food in St Mary Street in Cardiff without hesitation.

But with our Saturday restaurant, we are a bit too chummy with the owner and staff, but not chummy enough to have a sub standard dish dismissed as just another irritation instantly remedied.  A tricky situation.

So, in some situations, my much vaunted charm and politeness are just veneers, have no depth and do nothing except give a gloss to the problem.

I’ll carry on smiling because that’s the easiest way!

The people have decided? Again!

Although still bitter about the fact that 52% of those who bothered to vote decided that Brexit was a sensible solution to the perceived problems of a massively wealthy country with a privileged relationship with the largest trading partnership in the world – I can at least see that a distant professional political class linked to obvious disparity in the distribution of wealth and the completely unscrupulous campaign of a group of post-truth ruthlessly selfish, self-seeking political opportunists might offer some sort of explanation for what appears (still) to be a collective decision to shoot whatever feet were available to view.

            If I hear another person say something to the effect that, “Things are not as bad as those who said we would really suffer when we left the EU are they?” just once again.  I will scream. 

            May I point out that we have not actually left the EU?  We are still full members of that organization, though we now appear not to go to certain meetings, allowing the French and Germans to decide whatever is best for their own interests.  We have not left.  That is years in the future.  A future completely and utterly unsafe in the conspiratorial hands of an unelected Prime Minister of a Party that  . . .  well, you can see the way that this rant is going.  And the point I want to make is not about the UK but my adopted country of Spain.

            The Conservatives, you will not be surprised to learn, is not my party of choice.  I have veered in my life between utter contempt for the Conservative Party (it was a real effort for me to give the title of such a beggared organization capital letters) to downright loathing.

            

     At the moment I tend more to the latter than the former.  It is difficult to feel anything remotely positive about an unelected Prime Minister who presents her choice of Foreign Secretary as anything than a joke in poor taste and, further, who expects to be taken seriously when she suddenly pulls the emaciated and ossified corpse of the rabbit of the reintroduction of grammar schools from the cesspit of unthinking Tory appeasement.  And that is enough of a mixed metaphor to be going on with.

            Just a reminder about the subject of this diatribe – which is Spain. 

            However, just before we get to that country, I would like to make a link between this ‘policy’ suggestion of the re-introduction of grammar schools and the Anglican Church.  As an Anglican Atheist myself, I feel a certain nostalgic concern for the doings of the Church and I am always fascinated by Religion.  There are important concerns that religion attempts to wrestle with and believers and non-believers can gain from studying the way that the Church has struggled with some of the major philosophical and social questions since its institution.  It has thought long and hard and Church thinkers have contributed to the intellectual development of our civilization.  It is therefore all the more frustrating that sizeable sections of the modern church find challenges like social and political inequality too difficult to cope with and so turn to ‘easy’ questions to which there appear to be equally ‘easy’ answers.

            If you find that church leaders are attempting to find ways to challenge the vested interests of the status quo, the easiest way to unsettle their socialist tendencies is to raise the twin concerns which are guaranteed to act in the same way as the chorus of sheep in Animal Farm who chanted, “Four legs good; two legs bad!” as soon as any other animal challenged the authority of the pigs.  The two key areas whose discussion will swamp anything else are, of course, the questions of Abortion and the ‘question’ of homosexuality.

            If you want another example of one stupid thing swamping discussion from my experience as a teacher, then it would be an item on a staff meeting agenda discussing school uniform and the pupils’ wearing of jewellery.

            The amount of time that I have listened to discussions about the size, positioning, composition and cost of various items of clothing and earrings to be worn by school children make medieval scholastic discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin look like casual throw-away lines!

            So, the point that I am making is, the unelected May is raising the ghost of a lost policy with the concept of new grammar schools.  If she fails (and she should because there is no educational expert who thinks that they work for all children) then she can point to the fact that she did her best but the establishment (sic) did her down.  If she succeeds then she will make the middle class grunts in the shires happy as they will assume that their privileged darlings will obviously get to the grammar schools and the lesser breeds without the law (who don’t vote Conservative anyway) will get the Sec Mods that they deserve!

            I can’t wait to see the Jesuitical logic that will have to be used to show that naïf little Candide’s tutor was right all along and they will be the best possible schools in this best of all possible educational worlds. 

            I assume that all of Trump’s speeches are being video recorded for cabinet ministers to learn from.  After all, the fact that the rambling gibberish that he spouts has nothing to do with education doesn’t make any difference as he finds it difficult to focus on anything at all, apart from spouting twisted childhood memories of the nursery rhyme about Dumpty Dumpty – and it all seems to go down well with a certain section of the Republican Party.  And how different are the American and British Conservatives anyway?  It’s just the Brits don’t have guns.  Yet.

            Anyway, Spain.

            We have just had the results from the election in Galicia and the PP (the Spanish Conservative Party) has won an overall majority.  Again.

            If you do not live in Spain that may mean little.  If you do live in Spain it is incredible.

            

          PP has had the sort of catastrophically bad publicity for months and months and months that would be amusing if it were not all too real.  Every treasurer of the party, since it was founded, has been charged with criminal mismanagement.  Corruption has become synonymous with the name of the party and day after day companies, politicians, businessmen, party workers, anyone in fact who has had any contact with this toxic brand have been accused.  The scale, of what can only be called theft, is astonishing and scalps have been claimed by courageous media types who bring the latest misdemeanours to light.

            The epic mismanagement of public funds in Valencia has degenerated into pure farce with the senator for Valencia being accused by the High Court and then resigning from PP who put her there so that the acting president (PP) can claim it is nothing to do with him because she is no longer in the party!  In an ironic touch which is poignant to the point of insult: the ‘senadora’ actually gets paid more now that she is not in a party and has extra funds allocated so that she can manage alone outside the framework of an established organization!  The idea of resignation for the misdemeanours of her dictatorial and grasping reign in Valencia does not of course enter her head and, with a brazen audacity that takes the breath away she continues to flaunt her apparent disinterest in the chaos that she has caused.

            It is difficult to give a true impression of just how overwhelming the stench of corruption is in this country.  Any one of the tens of major scandals that have rocked this country would have settled the hash of any government in the UK trying to brave it out.  But in Spain, few of the true criminals are actually in prison.

            Spain has a whole section of society that is above ordinary justice: thousands of people who cannot be tried in the same way as ordinary citizens.  The UK has no one who is above the law in this way.  German has no one who is above the law in this way.

            Spain may point to the fact that the sister of the present King was actually arraigned in court for corruption and was cross-examined.  And as part of her evidence she said, “I don’t know” hundreds of times.  I think in a British court she would have been charged with contempt.  And we are still waiting for a judgement.  I am not holding my breath that she will spend the time in prison that one of the prosecutors has demanded.  Her husband was arraigned with her, charged with exploiting the royal name and overcharging by misappropriating public funds (guess where!) etc etc.

            In spite of the torrent of adverse publicity, Galicia has voted in a majority PP government in its autonomous region!  It makes one weep.  In spite of the massive amount of evidence that points to institutional systemic corruption, they vote for more of the same.

            It is, sometimes, difficult to maintain an optimistic approach.  But not impossible.

            There are solutions to the present situation.  The parties of the left could find some sort of way to work together to stop what would be a total disaster – the continuation of the ‘government’ of PP.  They must find a way.  

          In a very real sense, the future of a united Spain depends on it.