Long life
A new Ice Age sets in
Nigel Nlcolson
You're not going to believe this,' said the young woman to her friend as we col- lected our coats. 'The man sitting next to me at dinner talked to me the whole time about the Ice Age.' I was that man. I do not think she realised that I overheard her remark, for she said goodnight to me quite nicely, but it was a lesson that I have never forgotten. That afternoon I had been read- ing an article about the Ice Age and imag- ined that the subject would fascinate every- one as much as, very temporarily, it fascinated me. In this I was mistaken. The poor girl was subjected to a lecture, and as her responses became increasingly morose, I tried to stir her imagination by piling fact on fact, theory on theory. I did not succeed.
It was a failure on my part to change the conversational sails when they were obvi- ously not catching the wind, or, to put it more brutally, a total insensitivity to the limits of another person's tolerance. I was like Mrs. Elton in Emma, the bore of bores, and the mark of incurable bores is that they do not realise what bores they are. The non-bore begins to hear himself prating, and stops. The bore goes on.
It is a question of good manners. The rule is very simple: that life is more agree- able for the existence of certain social con- ventions that everyone has come to know as instinctively as they know the moves in chess. The rules were established long before Lord Chesterfield, and while they are brought up to date from time to time, the variations, surprisingly, are marginal.
Take, for instance, Modern Manners by Drusilla Beyfus, which she subtitles 'The Essential Guide to Living in the 90s'. The book is 350 pages long, crammed with tips on how to behave in different circum- stances, and there is scarcely one that I didn't already know, at least subliminally, and very few with which I disagreed. Although she never specifies the class she has in mind, calling it 'mainstream' and making an occasional allusion to 'the last bus home', the drawings give the game away: they are all of comfortable home- counties people in their mid-thirties with whom the essence of good behaviour is assumed to reside. When it comes to mix- ing guests from different backgrounds, Beyfus is at her most tactful:
It is distinctly unwise to assume that the characteristics of our so-called 'plural soci- ety', in which colour, creed and class rub shoulders, can necessarily be contained with- in the small world of private entertaining.
She might have added 'generations' to her list of doubtful mixers.
There were some tips new to me. I did not know that it is correct to address a Mayor as 'Right Worshipful'. I did not know that it is now 'acceptable' to make two weekend guests of the same sex share a bedroom, even if they were previously unknown to each other. How many are the solecisms that I have committed from igno- rance of the rules or bending them! I have sat down alone with the hostess to scram- bled eggs on Sunday evening when all the other guests had left, as expected, after lunch. I have written a letter of condolence to a widow making a joke about her late husband's inebriety. I have taken a woman's elbow to guide her across the street, only to have my face slapped. But worst of all was to talk interminably to my neighbour about the Ice Age.
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