Musing on Manners.

I am in the midst of organising my daughter's 21st birthday which is probably the first large scale party I have dealt with. She had all the children's parties for the first ten or twelve years but this is the big one. Also the last one!

It has been a real learning curve for me I can tell you. We sent out  invitations to approximately 140 people for a light lunch. They were due to be answered by earlier this week and with a lot of emailing to many of the younger ones we have ended up with about 95 replies. Now the day will be fairly informal and I am catering for it myself (with help) so it is reasonably flexible. I have stated and with feeling that I want no part of a wedding! How in the heck do you book a venue 12 months in advance when it is nearly impossible to get replies from people a mere 6 weeks in advance?

This initially made me very annoyed and I kept thinking how rude the people were. Now I have stopped and chewed the whole thing over in order to work out why it upsets me so much. The answer I have come up with is that good old fashioned manners is much more than saying thank you or excuse me. What good manners is really all about is thinking about others.

It is about having respect for and acknowledgement of other people! It is being aware that other people don't want to hear or smell you passing wind or burping. Other people don't want to have to wait on you to decide when or if you will reply to them. Other people don't want to hear you eating your food or slurping your drink because that can take away their pleasure of food and drink.

Further thinking on this brought me to a place where I realise that this is indicative of the way many people live today - with no respect for other people let alone for animals, trees, the earth and everything on or in it.

I think we should demand that good manners be brought back and that people should not be allowed to promise one thing and deliver another. People should be held accountable for what they do and their children should also be held responsible. I am not so sure that 'politically correct' is always morally correct.

I think manners are far more important to a fair and equitable way of life than is generally recognised. Yet when someone politely and genuinely thanks us or displays good old fashioned manners to us we feel good about that. Why is that so?