In October 2004, a fifteen-year-old girl at a school near Swindon became the centre of a news story when she spearheaded a rebellion. Apparently, the school’s head teacher had “reminded” pupils that they were not allowed to hold hands, kiss, or otherwise parade their sexuality in “the workplace”. Outraged, the pupils fought back. They staged a 200-strong strike plus a rally, and then set about petitioning the governors. This was an infringement of their human rights! “At sixteen, you can get married,” argued the fifteen-year-old who got herself into the papers. “So to say you’re not allowed to touch each other is ridiculous.”
In February 2005, the Virginia State House of Representatives voted by a 60 – 34 majority to outlaw the wearing of low-slung jeans. The so-called Droopy-Drawer Bill forbade the exposure of underwear in a way that was “lewd or indecent”. The bill’s sponsor told the house: “To vote for this bill would be a vote for character, to uplift your community and to do something good not only for the state of Virginia, but for this entire country.” “Underwear is called underwear for a reason,” commented one of his colleagues.
In June 2005, the London Evening Standard broke the news we had all been waiting for: “Soon We’ll Watch TV As We Travel on the Tube.” Evidently a trial of the new service will begin in 2006, and full service should be in place by the following year. “London Underground is planning to install the necessary technology to access broadcasts via the phone and digital radio. It also plans to offer wireless internet access in stations and on trains so that commuters using laptops can check their email or surf the net.” Might there be “quiet” carriages, where people could escape the TV, radio, phoning, and surfing? No. “We will focus on education instead,” said a spokesman. “People need to be told to be tolerant, so we will be running ads similar to those found on overground trains.”
In March 2005, the New York Times ran a story headlined “No Need to Stew: A Few Tips to Cope with Life’s Annoyances”, about people who were taking small revenges on the annoyances of modern life. One Mr Williams (of Melrose, NY) had devised a way of settling the score against junk-mailers, which entailed inserting heavy paper and small strips of sheet metal in the business-reply envelopes, thus forcing the junk-mailers to pay huge extra postage. “You wouldn’t believe how heavy I got some of those envelopes to weigh,” he said. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service said that Mr Williams’s actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.
In papers everywhere for the past year or two, there has been larky but desperate advice from columnists and stand-up comedians on how to deal with cold callers, either on the phone or in person. First prize goes to the Independent’s Charles Nevin, who came up with: “Thank goodness! Do you have experience in restraining people?” as a way of dealing with nuisance callers on the doorstep. Close runner-up was his colleague Deborah Ross, who described how her partner always asks flatly, “Are you selling something?” When this is hastily denied, he says, “That’s a pity. I was in the mood for buying something over the phone, whatever the cost. But now I fear the moment has passed. Goodbye.”
Finally, in The Guardian in April 2005, came the story of research conducted by a psychiatrist from King’s College London, which proved that the distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages were a greater threat to concentration and IQ than smoking cannabis. “Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox,” wrote Martin Wainwright. “Manners are also going by the board, with one in five of the respondents breaking off from meals or social engagements to receive and deal with messages. Although nine out of ten agreed that answering messages during face-to-face meetings or office conferences was rude, a third nonetheless felt that this had become ‘acceptable and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency’.”
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Sometimes I think we were better off before the term “personal space” escaped from sociology and got mixed up with popular ideas of entitlement. It is now, however, firmly in the Oxford Dictionary of English, defined as “The physical space immediately surrounding someone, into which encroachment can feel uncomfortable or threatening.” You will note that there is no measurement indicated in this definition, such as “Generally accepted to be about a yard behind and two yards in front”, which is an oversight on the part of the ODE, I think, because a lot of people would like to know their precise rights where personal space is concerned. As it is, everyone is tiresomely free to define their personal space subjectively, and to appeal to it when it suits them. Rude people are especially fond of the personal-space defence. Children insist on their right to personal space. Even my cat knows about it. You should see the way he looks at me when I attempt to share the comfy chair with him in front of the telly. “Budge up,” I say, cheerfully. “The golf’s on. You don’t even like golf. Name me one player you recognise.” And he purses his lips in that peculiar long-suffering, affronted-cat way, and I can hear him thinking, “I don’t believe it. She’s invading my personal space again.”
I have to admit, I am rather keen on keeping other people at arm’s length. If a chap stands an inch behind me and loudly crunches and slurps an apple, I suffer and moan and clench all the clenchable parts of my anatomy, but what I really want to do (please don’t tell anybody) is to turn round on the spot with fists raised, and with an efficient, clean one-two, knock all his teeth out. What I would really appreciate is a kind of negative polarity I could switch on in personal-space emergencies; in fact, now I think of it, is there any lovelier, more comforting four-word combination than “Activate the force field”? All my life, I seem to have seen wonderful, battery-draining force fields demonstrated in science-fiction movies, but let me tell you: if you try to buy one, you draw a blank. You can’t even get an automatic apple-atomiser that will detect inappropriately propinquitous apple-consumption, blow the fruit to smithereens and deliver a mild incidental electric shock to the genitals. No, personal space is still an ideal rather than a solid reality off which bullets would bounce and swords glance. The best mental picture I can come up with for personal space as we know it is a spherical membrane eight feet in diameter with a person inside it, bowling along like a hamster in a ball.
All the news stories above – about the Swindon schoolgirl, the man sending sheet metal through the post, and so on – are concerned with the notion of “space”, one way or another. The trouble is, our own personal space always seems to be up for grabs in unacceptable ways. Other people don’t respect our personal space and are conducting private phone conversations in public places, regardless of the annoyance they cause. Which is very, very rude of them. Ask people about rudeness, and after “Why don’t people say thank you?” and “Why am I always the one doing everything?”, the subject of annoying mobile phone users comes up more quickly than you can say “I’m on the train.” What is happening? Why is this such a big issue? Have some people truly lost all sense of being out in public? Has some vital inhibitor in their brains been switched off? Surely we all agree that the question “Should I do this?” ought to have an automatic subsidiary question, “Should I do this here?” But on the other hand, are some of us extending our personal space an unreasonable distance – basically, for as far as the eye can see or the ear can hear? Why don’t we accept that being out of doors means being with other people who do things we can’t control?
In reality, mostly people on public transport listen inoffensively to iPods, or quietly text on their mobile phones, which are private activities designed simply to remove them from their surroundings, in pretty much the same way that reading a newspaper both passes the time and sends out the barrier signal, “Leave me alone.” Yet there is something more profound going on. Our hamster balls just keep clashing with other people’s hamster balls, and it isn’t comfortable. The fifteen-year-old Swindon girl feels she has a right to canoodle at school. Academic friends say their students answer calls during lectures. Lovers lolling on the public grass on a sunny day glare at you if you look at them, as if you have just walked into their living-room. People chat in the cinema during the film, and sometimes in the theatre during the play. Air travellers on long-haul flights change into pyjamas in the lavatories. It’s as if we now believe, in some spooky virtual way, that wherever we are, it’s home.
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I have a rather heretical view when it comes to mobile phones, so I’d better confess to it at once. I don’t mind people saying, “I’m on the train.” It truly doesn’t annoy me. Here are the things that drive me nuts when I’m out. I can’t stand people talking in the cinema. I can’t stand other people’s cigarette smoke, especially outdoors. I am scared and angry when I hear the approach of young men drunkenly shouting. I can’t stand children skateboarding on pavements, or cyclists jumping lights and performing speed slaloms between pedestrians, and I am offended by T-shirts with ugly Eff-Off messages on them. It was, however, the rather mild “Bored of the Beckhams” that was my least favourite T-shirt slogan of recent years, for the usual shameful pedantic reasons. “Bored with the Beckhams!” I would inwardly moan, reaching for the smelling salts in my lavender portmanteau. “Or even bored by the Beckhams, if you must! But bored of the Beckhams? Never, my dear, never!”
What else? Well, I am incensed by graffiti, and would like to see offenders sprayed all over with car-paint and then strung up for public humiliation. (As you can tell, I’ve given a lot of thought to that one.) I also can’t abide to see people drop litter; it truly shocks me. People of all ages evidently think nothing of reaching into a bag, discovering something surplus to requirements, holding it out at arm’s length and then insouciantly letting go. Walking along the Brighton seafront one balmy evening, I saw a woman perform a nappy-change on a public bench and then just leave the old nappy and the paper towels behind, when there was a litter-bin about fifteen feet away. Occasionally I will confront a litter-bug, running after them and saying, “Excuse me, I think you dropped this.” But, well, I say “occasionally”; I’ve done it twice. Sensibly I weigh the odds. If the person is bigger than me, or is (very important consideration, this) accompanied by anyone bigger than me, I walk away. As a litter-bug vigilante, I know my limits. If they are over five foot two, or older than four, I let it go.
But as I say, the thing that doesn’t drive me nuts is other people’s mobile phones – mainly, I suspect, because I have one myself, but also because hearing a stranger on the phone humanises them in (to me) a generally welcome way, whereas watching them blow smoke in the air or drop soiled tissue or deface a building does quite the opposite. It seems to me obvious that “I’m on the train” is the main thing you will hear other people say, because – being reasonable about it – the train is the main place you are likely to hear people talking on mobile phones. If they said instead, “I’m in the bath” you’d think, hang on, no you’re not, you’re on the train. Actually, the only depressing aspect of this is how boringly honest people are. They seem to have no imagination at all. When they say, “Just pulling into Haywards Heath, dear,” I look up optimistically every time, but dammit, we always are just pulling into Haywards Heath. I yearn to hear someone say, “Yes, dear; next stop Albuquerque”, when the train is arriving in Ramsgate. “Yes, the dog’s with me, he sends a woof, don’t you, boy, eh, yes you do, yes you do (ruff, ruff!)” when there’s actually no dog anywhere in sight.
To me, the delight of people answering or making calls is that they suddenly – and oblivious to the enforced eavesdropping – reveal enormous amounts about themselves, as if they had, under the influence of hypnosis, stood up on a table and started stripping, and then, just as suddenly, got down again, adjusted their clothing, and resumed the anonymity of the everyday humdrum passenger. Of course, I have overheard – and resented – banal, annoying, and even obscene mobile calls. A friend of mine travelling from Victoria to Brighton was obliged to overhear all the arrangements for the felonious handover of counterfeit money (“That last lot was like bog paper!” the bloke yelled, striking terror in all his fellow passengers). I once stood in misery in a taxi queue while a huge drunk man behind me bellowed a rather vile account of the evening’s sexual exploits (“I said to her, ‘No nails, love! No nails! The wife’ll Effing kill me!’ ”). But on the whole, I rather welcome the chance it gives us to overhear other people’s business. And of course one day I’ll hear someone standing outside Waterloo station saying, “Yes, Istanbul is so magical in the springtime!” and it will make me very happy.
But just because I find it quite interesting doesn’t mean that it isn’t yet another symptom of our almost insane levels of self-absorption. The trouble is, the telephone has always had the ability to distract us from our duty to our surroundings; it is, quite simply, an anti-social instrument. When you are talking to someone face-to-face and the phone interrupts you, you can be as polite as you like about it (“Excuse me, do you mind, I’m sorry”), but it’s still a snub to the person present. I used to visit a friend in her office, and would often go through a very painful pantomime when she answered the phone, because she would launch into an animated conversation immediately, but when I mimed a discreet “I’ll go, then”, she would wave and frown at me, insisting I stay, and roll her eyes exaggeratedly at how annoying it was to be on the phone to this total bore, all the while laughing and chatting, and giving no verbal indication that she had someone present in her office and therefore ought to cut it short. “And then what?” she would ask, beckoning me back as I tried to escape. “No! Really? I’ve always thought that about him!” I would writhe in agony at how rude she was being to me, how rude she was being to the other person (who didn’t know), and how miserable I was, having to listen to all this. Imagine calling her up, after witnessing scenes like this. “Is this a bad moment?” I would ask. “Is there anyone there? Who’s there? I bet there’s someone there!” “No, of course there isn’t!” she would assure me, but I still imagined her scribbling my name on a piece of paper, pushing it across the desk, and miming being sick down a lavatory.
When people look for a piece of technology to blame for modern manners, it is often television that cops the lot, but we forget what an impact the telephone had when it was first introduced. With the advent of the phone, people could choose to conduct real-time private conversations with people who weren’t there. Having grown up with universal telephone technology, we find this idea pretty unremarkable, but Carolyn Marvin’s fascinating book When Old Technologies were New (1988) points out that there were considerable fears in the last quarter of the nineteenth century about the impact the telephone would have – quite common-sense fears, actually, that mainly came true, and that neatly parallel our current concerns about the internet. The telephone was an instrument for speaking to someone who couldn’t see you, and who could be many miles away. It cut through normal social etiquette. Because of these factors, it would make people more confiding and open, but also less civil, less deferential, and less honest. It would facilitate crime. Children would become furtive, anti-social, and uncontrollable. Young people could make assignations with it. None of this seems ridiculous or alarmist to me, incidentally, except perhaps for the warning from the editor of a Philadelphia newspaper in 1894 who cautioned his readers “not to converse by phone with ill persons for fear of contracting contagious diseases”.
The impact of the phone on the “proprieties of presence” was immediately worrying. People spoke more freely on the telephone. Women gossiped on it. Formerly, there was a code for speaking when at home, and a code for speaking when outside the home. Both codes were posited on observing the presence of others and the etiquette of the surroundings. But the phone was one-to-one, and neither indoors nor outdoors, and the four walls of domestic privacy were breached for ever. “The home wears a vanishing aspect,” lamented Harper’s in 1893. Carolyn Marvin quotes from The Times in 1897 the astonishingly modern prediction, “We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other.” She also quotes, from the same year, a presentation by W. E. Ayrton to the British Imperial Institute which exactly predicted the weirdness of the mobile phone, anticipating it by about a century:
When a person wants to telegraph a friend, he knows not where, he will call in an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else, he will call, “Where are you?” and the reply will come loud to the man with the electromagnetic ear, “I am at the bottom of a coal mine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Pacific.”
My point is, we have to place our annoyance at the mobile phone in this context. For over a hundred years, we have been pretty useless at juggling the relative claims of the there and the not-there. Perhaps that’s why we are so miserable about the way people now use mobiles in public: it reminds us that we didn’t deal with this problem adequately when it first arose. We let things slide. We pretended it didn’t matter. We loved the phone too much to care. But phones have always obtruded; they have always trapped us in their tracker beams and transported us instantaneously to another planet. A phone conversation, being both blind and one-to-one, is a more intense and concentrated form of communication than talking face-to-face. Inevitably, then, when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate – with quite elaborate behaviours – for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. “Go ahead!” we say. “Don’t mind us! Oh look, here’s a magazine I can read!” When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused, and to restore good feeling. “Oh, it was your mother, was it? Well, I wondered, naturally, but I wasn’t really listening.”
And now people are yelling, “So I said to her, no nails!” or “That last lot was like bog paper!” down their mobile phones in public places, and we don’t know what to do about it besides boil and seethe. If only you could ignore it. In fact, why can’t you ignore it? Do you see how the person sitting next to the caller – their boyfriend, their mum – is usually quite happily gazing out of the window or doing a word-search puzzle? Why are they so unaffected? Isn’t that a bit perverse of them? What’s going on?
Well, let’s say you are with someone you know, at his house or in his office, and he has to take a phone call. A void opens up, doesn’t it? It’s a kind of limbo. A positive becomes, as it were, a temporary negative. You were plus a person; now you are minus a person. While the phone call unfolds, you sympathetically adopt a minus position yourself. When it’s over, and you get the person back, you both become positive again (i.e. both are present and aware of each other).
But when the person who goes on the phone is a stranger, it’s entirely different. In a train compartment where all are strenuously activating their feeble force fields, the void, the limbo, is implicitly agreed to be the desired state of all. Then the phone rings, a young woman answers it, and a bizarre thing happens: she duly absents herself from her surroundings, but the result is not a double negative, as you might suppose. She becomes a positive! “Ange! I was gonna phone ya! Wha’ appened? Djoo gow off wiv im?” Yes, two negatives make an intensely annoying positive! Not only that, but her sudden vivid presence demands that everyone else become positive too, hanging on every word. It’s awful. The old healing rituals don’t apply in this situation, since there is no conciliatory “Do you mind?” beforehand, or explanatory “That was my mother” afterwards. And a different, unsatisfactory kind of positive is achieved, in any case. You are now intensely aware of this intensely present woman. “Yer, well, she’s a slag in’t she?” But of course she is not remotely aware of you.
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Why don’t we object more often? Why is advice on this issue always facetious, unrealistic, and only weakly amusing?
“Switch on a tape recorder and place it in front of the person speaking. They will soon shut up.”
“Note down their number and call it immediately, pretending to be someone from the office.”
“When they have loudly broadcast their address and credit card details, text this information to them with the accompanying message, For God’s sake, we can all hear you, shut up.”
“Wait for the call to finish, then go over and start talking to the user, but just mouth the words.”
“Pick up their phone and throw it out of the window.”
There are many reasons why we don’t do these things. Ingrained politeness and fear of reprisal are prominent among them. Also, any fair-minded person is bound to ask, “Why am I taking this personally? I know perfectly well that it’s not personal.” So we grumble and sigh and fidget, and occasionally catch the eye of another passenger similarly fed up, because we feel that a public space should be neutral and shared. We don’t want to dominate it ourselves; we just don’t want anyone else to dominate it, either – and the idea of people being able to tune in to telly stations on the underground drives me close to despair. In that New York Times story of the business-reply envelope guerrilla, there is a tantalising reference to illegal hand-held “jammers” that can block all phone signals in a forty-five-foot radius; also a gadget called “TV-B-Gone”, which can switch off televisions, rather as the name implies. I am urgently in the market for both these wonderful inventions – especially if they operate secretly, as I am getting quite bold (not to say stroppy) in this regard already, and am generally asking for a punch in the face. I now automatically ask taxi drivers to switch off their annoying talk radio; at the self-storage warehouse, where a pop channel is left blaring amid the units for the supposed entertainment of the patrons, I just march in and unplug the hi-fi; at Broadcasting House, if I am waiting alone in reception, I switch off Radio 2. When I am thwarted in my mission to restore neutral quiet to public areas, by the way, I get quite confused. “Anyone listening to this?” I said the other day in the dentist’s waiting-room, finger already poised above the “Off” button (which wasn’t easy, as the hi-fi was fixed quite high up on the wall). “Yes, I am,” said a woman. I was completely taken aback. If she hadn’t looked pained and swollen, I think I would have called her a liar.
Back with the mobile phone, however, I have started to think that the rudeness is not in answering them, because answering a ringing phone is a kind of conditioned reflex that few of us can resist. I am beginning to think it is much more rude to call one. I find that people I’ve never spoken to before are increasingly choosing to call me on my mobile before even checking whether I am at my desk. They then leave a message involving a lot of numbers that I’m in no position to write down. Since my mobile doesn’t work properly indoors (insufficient signal), it will merely indicate that I have a message. Sighing and muttering, I have no choice but to put some shoes on, leave the house, climb a hill, and pace up and down with my eyes closed and my fist to my head. Then I come back downhill, come indoors, grab a pen and paper, go up the hill again and listen again, taking notes. When I finally get back indoors again, huffing and fuming, I reach for the phone and discover that, while I’ve been outside doing this Grand Old Duke of York impression for the neighbours, the bastards have called me at my desk as an afterthought.
The most touching aspect of that 1897 prediction about the electromagnetic voice communicating with the electromagnetic ear is that the voice cries out, “Where are you?” and the reply comes, so splendidly, “In the Andes!” This, of course, is the key to the universal jumping-up-and-down reaction to “I’m on the train.” Surely a technology so miraculous deserves to convey communication that’s a bit less banal? Other people’s overheard conversations fall into four categories, it seems to me, and each carries its own objection:
All these types are uncomfortable to listen to. But it’s hard to see what can be done. On the one hand, it is a natural thing in humans to communicate. Putting the mobile phone in context, with the birth of each new form of communication technology (the penny post, the postcard), there has been a similar explosion of superfluous usage, just for the hell of it. On the other hand, however, the inconsiderateness is a proper cause for concern, and in particular it highlights a new development of relations in public: that group pressure no longer operates in the way that it once did. Formerly, a person might weigh it up: I want to do this anti-social thing, but there are twenty other people here, so I won’t. The calculation now is different. I want to do this anti-social thing, and if anyone objects, I’ll tell him to Eff Off. I can bank on him not getting support from other people, incidentally, because that’s the way things are.
The Eff-Off reflex is where we will pick up the story of modern rudeness in the next chapter. But in the meantime, there was one particular point from those news stories I want to pick up. Of course, I’m hoping that other people share my reaction to those stories, which is, broadly:
“Whatever happened to consideration?” we cry. Well, the prerequisite of consideration is the ability to imagine being someone other than oneself, and that’s a bit of a lost cause. For me, the detail that springs out and alarms me most from the news stories at the start of this chapter is the word “tolerant” in the London Underground report. “We will focus on education instead,” said a spokesman. “People need to be told to be tolerant, so we will be running ads similar to those found on overground trains.” The spokesman is, I think, suggesting that those who make calls or watch TV in a crowded Northern Line carriage should be considerate of other passengers; oddly, however, he uses the word “tolerant” instead.
Why? Well, it is possible that he just has a small vocabulary, but it’s still a significant slip. From his point of view, you see, the nuisance-makers will soon be the ones operating within their rights. Therefore, if trouble is to be avoided, the nuisance-makers are the ones who must be tolerant; they must exercise saintly forbearance when they find people around them shouting, “Turn that Effing thing off! Turn that Effing thing off! It’s driving me Effing mad!” Being tolerated by selfish people who don’t understand that they’re in public may be the final straw for some of us. We may have no alternative – and I didn’t want to get quite so gloomy when I’m only half-way through the book – but we may have no alternative but to stay home and bolt the door.