Laura Craik on modern manners, Balenciaga crocs and television rage

Last night, my husband wiped his avocado-y hands on the white dishtowel, and it was all I could do not to lamp him.

For sure, there are things I do that make him want to lamp me, too. So far, neither of us has lamped each other and it’s been almost 10 years. Living together is hard. Whether in the same house, the same street or the same city, sometimes living together can make even the most imperturbable among us want to run for the hills, or at least google ‘sparsely populated islands with decent coffeeshops’.

Given that we all do have to live together, it makes sense that common courtesies are adhered to. Sure, men feel a bit ‘damned if they do and damned if they don’t’ about the etiquette surrounding issues such as holding doors open/giving up their Tube seat/paying for dinner — but there are social niceties on which the jury is definitely not out. Amber Rudd, for example, should not have had to (seemingly) hiss ‘stand up’ when Boris Johnson was slow to rise to his feet after Theresa May’s Tory Party Conference speech. Jamie Redknapp probably shouldn’t have cropped out his wife Louise from the family photo he used as his avatar on Instagram (thankfully since replaced) — whatever is going on between them, this wasn’t very kind. And Donald Trump really, really needs to think before making comments such as the relief efforts to help hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico have put the US budget ‘a little out of whack’.

The problem with bad manners is that they stick: once yours have been exposed, inevitably, you’ll be lodged in the imagination as a wrong ’un. Good manners cost nothing, yet they make life — especially overcrowded London life — so much easier for everyone. Without wishing to state the obvious, it’s always better to act like a gentleman than a twit.

Rip-offs

Feeling a bit under the weather? Chest aching after those ill-advised Friday night fags? Be careful who you share this information with — before you know it, someone will be posting on Twitter that you’re dead. Such is everyone’s thirst to be first with the news these days that they are sometimes ill-advisedly premature: witness the demise of poor Tom Petty, whose ‘death’ was widely announced — when he was still very much alive, albeit in hospital having suffered a heart attack. Petty did, very sadly, die — just many hours after various news outlets claimed he had. BREAKING: being #first to write a load of made-up bollocks means nothing.

Fostering anger

I get that we’re all angry, and that we can’t tell the people we’re angry with because we don’t have Kim Jong-un’s mobile number, nor has Robert Mugabe ever surfaced on one of our 642 different WhatsApp groups, though give it time. Nonetheless, don’t take it out on the poor telly. The great British tradition of being disappointed by the final episode of whichever crime drama/psychological thriller you’ve been emotionally invested in for weeks surely reached its nadir with the finale of Doctor Foster, which seemed to have the whole of London (those without a life, anyway) going fully nuclear because she didn’t kill Simon/she nearly killed Simon/she tried to abet Simon’s suicide. No, really: feel free to tweet your preferred ending in forensic detail. If ever there was a reason not to expand Twitter to 280 characters, this is it.

Hot

Croc Wars: People losing their s*** about Balenciaga’s platforms... If you don’t like Crocs, go buy another pair of black ankle boots.

Not

Pesto ‘Saltier than the sea,’ apparently. And there was me thinking it was healthy just because it was green.