Is it ever polite to use one’s fingers to eat?
I.R.R., Acton
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Some things are difficult — impossible? — to eat any other way. Oysters (I should be so lucky)? Artichokes? Henry VIII grasped his mutton bones to chew, then chucked them over his shoulder for the dogs. In the late 11th century, when a Byzantine princess arrived in Venice to marry the Doge, it was found that she ate her food with a golden fork. She was given an ASBO by the Bishop for antisocial behaviour. The fork only came into general use during the Renaissance, purely for lifting morsels to one’s own plate. The table set of knife, fork and spoon was an 18th-century innovation. Use fingers with discretion, and with respect to what your companions are doing.
What is your feeling about charities that use people to accost you on the street? I think it is tantamount to harrassment.
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Evelyn Pelling, Guildford
I agree with your feelings. These chuggers — charity-muggers — do not tell you that they are paid for their activities, so that anything you give goes to them before the charity. Our generation is friendly and open to conversation with good-looking young strangers of all colours and classes engaged in moral blackmail. We should give as generously as we can afford to the charities we support, while not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing, so we are armed with the confidence of charitable virtue against all chuggers. And we should explain so politely to these pushy and self-righteous young pirates. Decent charities, aware of public distaste for such methods, have abandoned them.
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For years now my sister-in-law has given me so many fleece jerseys for Christmas that, if I’d kept them all, I would have seven. I do not wish to offend my sister-in-law, but is there any way I can stop this?
AnonyMissus, Warminster
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Do not look a gift horse or a fleece in the mouth. Pass the otiose fleeces on. My friend’s rich brother gives each of his seven sisters a Bradenham ham for Christmas. One year my friend intimated gently that her delicious ham had arrived slightly off. So now she gets a diary, while her sisters still get a ham.
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On a flight, a tall, obese man sat next to me in the middle of a row of three seats. It was most uncomfortable. After take off, I vacated my seat for an empty one in the back of the plane. Should I have explained my decision before I moved, so as not to cause him any offence (and allow him to spread out)?
Khaled Shivji, Pimlico
I too would have been worried about your fat friend feeling cold-shouldered. But explaining would only have brought the matter of his circumference into the public domain. I suspect that I would just have moved, as softly and silently as possible.
With regards to the debate about staircases, I was brought up with the idea that the man is always first to go both up and down — to catch the lady if she falls when going down, and to avoid the view of her legs and bum when going up. I would like to think that this concept is still up to date (I am in my mid-thirties), but many men do the opposite, to my disapointment.
Nathalie L-C, London
Headlong Hippolyta! Thank you for a persuasive explanation of this esoteric piece of “etiket”. I was going to suggest pragmatically (cynically?) that it depended on the relative sizes of the gent and the lady. We do not want the small man to be squashed flat if there is a fall. Our liberated age should be less frightened by the spectacle of legs or bum. Most of us have these appendages.
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