Mary Killen: Sandi Toksvig is wrong about the placement of the pudding fork

Sandi Toksvig, as this book’s cover declares, ‘makes Stephen Fry look like a layabout’. The broadcaster, author, comedian, actress and mother of three has also had time to churn out 20 books in 20 years. This one, a guide to modern manners, although dedicated to ‘Mary’, an eight-year-old girl whom she addresses regularly throughout, is said to be aimed at adults, or Mary when she grows up.

There is no snobbery within, but Toksvig makes the point early on that

The fact is you will do better in life if other people like you and find you are a pleasure to have around; if you know how to behave.

She talks the reader through ‘modern minefields’ such as Facebook and Twitter etiquette, work bullying and how to cull a wedding-guest list, and how to deal with them using Sandi’s correct form which is based on Commonsense, Comfort, Context and Consideration.

Sandi is popular, and News Quiz listeners often crave a scripted compendium of her wit. This will do: the tone is chatty and there are plenty of quasi-learned, etiquette-related nuggets here to enhance a reader’s own conversational repertoire.

Don’t overstay your welcome. When Charles Dickens invited Hans Christian Andersen to stay for two weeks in 1857, the latter stayed for five, driving the Dickens family ‘nuts’ to the extent that Dickens stopped writing to his one-time friend.

Warning that the superstition against l3 at the table is taken seriously by many, Sandi recounts how in l9th-century Paris there were public-spirited men called
quatorzièmes who would dress for dinner and wait at home to be called in the event of l3 people turning up.

‘Where there are no women there are no manners,’ observed Goethe. The custom of placing a man between two women at the table hails from the era of the Crusades (1000-1300) and was implemented to moderate the savagery of the knights as they consumed their fayre.