A funny couple of days... Not really making any progress anywhere. Spent a couple of happy afternoons fighting with B&Q kitchen drawers... the wire baskets on runners. Dead easy when I put them in the last kitchen (on the previous boat) - but that was when I was building the units. It's a bit of a trial to fit them into existing units which are built, fixed to the wall and full of stuff! Anyway, there are now four neat tidy drawers where there used to be a cupboard full of big stuff stacked on little stuff which all fell out if the door was opened - and sometimes even when it wasn't!
Yuletide present production has not really got going - the plan this year (as has been for the last few) is that pressies for grown-ups are one or more of; cost less than a fiver, made by the giver, from charity shops, preferably edible (or drinkable!) or usable rather than dustable... recent examples are monogrammed hankies, home-made sweeties, glasses cases, sloe gin... last year I got a brilliant bag of samples of expensive make-up - Clarins and Clinique - as I hardly wear the stuff a tiny sample is as much as I need, I am set up for the next ten years! Still not worked out what I am going to make for most of the family, and if I am honest sitting here tweeting and blogging is a displacement activity to get out of actually getting on with it.
I am working up to a bit of a rant about manners... Remember manners? old-fashioned stuff that your parents used to go on about. Giving my age away a bit here, but then it says I am fifty-summat all over this blog... Anyway, by the time I got to the end of junior school it was second nature to say please and thank you, to hold doors open, to give up a seat on the bus if someone else needed it, to apologise if anything went wrong whoever's fault it was ("terribly sorry" "no, my fault entirely" "no, no, I wasn't looking where I was going" "no, if my feet weren't so big you wouldn't have run over them with your shoppingtrolley") - all those little things that make the wheels of civilisation go around.
Manners seem to have taken a bit of a beating over the last few years. Not everywhere, and this isn't the "youth of today" complaint... Lots of people of all ages are perfectly polite. Having said that, there are some "more mature" people about who really should know better and set some sort of example. And don't get me started on people who expect manners from other people (particularly young people) but can't actually manage returning the compliment. I have lost count of the times I have seen my grandchildren holding doors open for streams of people who just glide past without bothering to say "Thank you", or seen "grown-ups" barge past them without so much as "excuse me" while loudly complaining that they are in the way...
Anyway, manners cost nothing. A step beyond having no manners, however, is blatant, gratuitous rudeness, which is unpleasant and unnecessary. If someone runs over my foot with a trolley, while I might not think it my fault for having such big feet (size 4!), I probably would hope that they might apologise, and would probably give them time to do so before gently remonstrating with them. (Although I am somewhat averse to conflict, so I would probably just hobble off and suffer quietly in the corner). What I would not do would be to scream and shout and eff and blind at them straight away - but this seems to be the option of choice much of the time.
And whilst mistaken identity, or a wrong number, can be annoying or potentially be embarrassing, surely it's possible to be polite about it. The guy I called yesterday, when a letter from the hospital had the wrong dialling code for an office I am not used to dialling, was clearly bored with hearing from people asking for ext 3608, but he managed to be polite about it...
So when my Mum-in-law sent a jolly "Happy Birthday" text message to her granddaughter (who has reached sweet sixteen today - Happy birthday E!) but got one digit wrong in the number, why was it necessary for the person who received this little attempt to spread joy to respond with "Who the f*ck are you?"
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