Another thing: Nosing the cheese
Observations on manners and class.
Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
I recently found myself in Ryman (the stationer) looking for sellotape. In a rush, I asked the person behind the cash desk to point me in the right direction. They were young and bored and pointed over towards one corner of the shop and said, the sellotape is just over by that woman.
Thinking nothing more of it, I walked over and started browsing. The woman who had been used as a reference point, though, wasn’t happy. She walked over to the young employee and said you don’t say woman, you say lady. The cashier didn’t seem too rattled by this and just apologised but, too late. The customer launched into a long lecture. It’s such a shame, she said, they just don’t teach you the right ways anymore. When I was young we were taught the right way to do things and now people just don’t know. It’s such a shame. The employee nodded along.
“Manners” and “etiquette” are an obsession of mine. I like watching channel 4 shows about fancy hotels and scoffing at the bizarre rules the waiting staff are forced to stick to; and those American shows about debutantes and finishing schools where young people (almost always women) are taught how they’re meant to behave in the world to project an image of propriety and dignity.
What surprised me about that Ryman customer’s interjection and subsequent tirade is not that these rigid ideas of politeness and etiquette exist, but how confident she was that her way of doing things was the right way. Age certainly had something to do with it but, more than that, it was class. I don’t know this for sure but, judging from her accent and her ideas and (most importantly) her confidence, something told me she went to a private school, where, as well as a top tier education, generations of rich people have been inducted into a special tier of society, the tier who know the right and wrong ways of doing things.
I’ve been caught out by this a few times. I was once chastised by a friend for “nosing the cheese”, which apparently is where you chop the pointy bit off the end of a triangle of brie, a rule I still don’t fully understand. On another occasion, I visited a wealthy friend’s house and was corrected when I put my salad into the same bowl as some pasta instead of using the chilled side plate provided. At the time of each of these instances, I felt mildly embarrassed that I had messed up, or was worried that I had somehow offended my hosts. I was young, and a people pleaser, and profoundly unsure of how I was supposed to behave at the best of times. I thought I was just displaying bad manners. What I didn’t realise at the time is that, whether those people were doing it intentionally or not, these are the mechanisms by which class boundaries are defined and reinforced.
To be clear, I’m firmly middle class. My parents had classic middle class jobs, working in education and in the civil service. This is not a tale of a humble working class hero being laughed at by rich people. But these examples still speak to a perversely hierarchical society, where manners are more than just being polite, they’re keys to a different world. These rules are not about what’s right or wrong, but about signaling belonging. Don’t know which fork to use? Then perhaps you’re in the wrong restaurant, sir.
The depressing thing about England* is the extent to which we wear ideas about ‘politeness’ and ‘civility’ as a badge of honour, all the while tacitly maintaining a system can only result in inequality. As a further sad example, I used to work in a champagne bar, and would occasionally find myself at fancy dinners, laid on by champagne houses looking to sell their brand to restaurant and hotel owners. I remember sitting at a table where a bunch of waiters and bartenders were trading stories about junior colleagues they’d seen committing some cardinal sin - putting the teaspoon on the wrong side of the saucer, or serving a plate of food with the meat pointing away from the customer - and scoffing about the naivety of it. The especially sad thing about this, in hindsight, is that these people weren’t rich. They were relatively low-paid, frontline, hospitality staff who had so internalised ideas about etiquette that they were gatekeeping for a class they could only ever aspire to be a part of.
(*appreciate there are many potential ends to this sentence at the moment).
I had a fairly boundaried childhood. There were rules I had to follow that I didn’t understand, but very often didn’t think to question. No elbows on the table, your fork needs to be held in your left hand etc. For a long time, I absorbed these things without interrogating them, and certainly without identifying them as a series of controls put in place and maintained by very wealthy people to identify who is an insider and who is an outsider.
I believe people cling to these rules and boundaries because they provide us with something else: order. There’s a strong correlation here to ongoing debates about ‘identity politics’. People don’t like it when the rules change, just like they don’t like it when they have to learn to moderate their language. It feels like a rug is being pulled out from underneath them, and it messes with their sense of identity. People cleave to the ideas they grew up with because it makes them feel safe, even though doing so also props up a class system that privileges a tiny number of people.
In my professional life, I work in inequalities, where our explicit aim is to deconstruct colonial and patriarchal systems of hierarchy and prejudice, and yet I still constantly hear old fashioned ideas about dress code and presentation, about the right way to behave or the right clothes to wear when meeting a senior colleague. It’s frustrating to see, even in the midst of a fight for equity, that people are reinforcing ideas about correctness that have spilled out of private schools and into our homes and workplaces.
And all this is what I said to that customer in Ryman. You’re the reason, I said, that our society is riven by class division but culturally hopelessly inclined to embed and exacerbate that division by telling people off for breaching arbitrary rules, and fawning over a royal family that serve as totem of a class that none of us will ever be a part of!
Except obviously I didn’t say that at all. I just bought my sellotape and got on my bike and cycled home meekly, seething all the way but doing nothing about it. I know my place.
Cultural indigestion
A record of things I’ve been doing.
Playing: I’ve not been reading much over the past few weeks, or really watching anything. And as much as I’d like to put that down to a rich social life, I think it’s just because I’ve been spending all my non-work, non-socialising time playing the new Zelda. Mechanically speaking, and in terms of game-design, it’s a near perfect open world. It rewards curiosity, challenges without frustrating, and is so thick with charm that even the tasks that might at first feel like menial busy-work are actually intensely rewarding and enriching experiences. Sure, the story is pretty shallow and the voice acting is bit of a misfire, but it’s the first time since Red Dead Redemption 2 that I’ve actually just wanted to spend time in a world because of the world itself. I’m sure I’ll be gushing more about it in the coming weeks.
Reading/listening: There was actually one other rewarding cultural event I was involved in this week. Last Sunday we helped our friend Cult of Youth organise a fringe event for the Stoke Newington Lit fest. We had a load of people come down for pizza and beer and to read either their own work or the work of others. Personally it was a good opportunity to read something in front of an audience which is something I’ve not done for years. It was such a collaborative, supportive, and creative vibe, and there’ll be potentially be more of that sort of thing in the future so keep your eyes peeled.