So yesterday afternoon I gave up my seat on the tram to an elderly woman, which prompted the man in front to offer his seat to me.
But not for the first time it made me think of that old practice of giving up your seat to a woman or opening a door for people and taking the kerb side of the pavement when out with my wife.
Old fashioned, sexist or just downright stupid?
All are habits that are deeply ingrained in me, and I suspect are no longer common practice, judging by the number of elderly people I see standing on moving trams while people half their age sit comfortably, gazing out of the window tuned into their phones.
What of course makes it even a bit more absurd is that at 75 I may have just been older than the woman who graciously accepted the offer of my seat.
But there you are such things run deep in me and were acquired sometime in the 1950s.
Along with that equally powerful taboo of not spitting in the street.
Of course, in that pre antibiotic age when many diseases were far more prevalent and dangerous than today the notion of not spitting in public was both sensible from a hygienic standpoint and just good manners.
It was a custom underlined by those signs on public transport calling on people to refrain from spitting, which long ago were consigned to museums secreted away in the section titled “curious practices from the past”.
To which perhaps I am equally a “curious leftover from the past”.
One of those leftovers who can’t quite get used to total strangers at call centres addressing me by my first name, as if we were long standing intimate friends and not just conducting a conversation about a lost shopping order.
But I should stop before I wax lyrical about queues, waiting your turn at the bus stop or saying thankyou to the bus driver.
Location; the past
Picture; crowded tram bound for town from Cornbrook, 2024, at Market Street, 2018, and standing room only from St Peter's Square, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
I share your views perhaps we were born in the years when families taught thwir children how ti behave towards elderly folk and invalids. I remember my Mother telling me to give up my seat on the bus when an elderly person got on so they did nit have to walk down the bus. We szt on our Mothers knee when we were small.
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