If there is one good thing to come out of this godawful pandemic, please can it be an end to the practice of air kissing? You might have spent the past year longing to give your friends a bear hug, or hold your grand children, but how many of us have really missed one of the most bizarre formal greetings during social distancing? I certainly haven’t. In fact, I am desperate for building back better to involve dispensing with this stupid affectation.
The beauty of a handshake is there is only really one way of doing it, and therefore much less room for things to go wrong.
It’s been around in our culture since the 1950s, initially with the aim of keeping a woman’s make-up intact by avoiding any contact with her lips or face, and has spread from the fashion and film worlds to showbusiness for ugly people: politics. It is by far the worst thing about my job as a political journalist, not least because few people agree on how one should air kiss.
In Westminster, the convention tends to be a double kiss of the air, but inevitably the odd MP ends up actually kissing your hair, or their paunch colliding with your outstretched hand because you thought it better to shake their hand rather than pretend to kiss someone who is solely a work contact. There is one senior figure who likes to start the air kiss from the opposite side to the conventional right cheek, which is surely some kind of power move to make you feel unsettled. Some people say ‘mwah’, others carry on talking nervously while weaving from one side to the other.
No one knows that they’re doing, and the regional variations are distressing. The further north I travel, the less the contact. If you attempt a double kiss north of Birmingham, you’ll get an awkward “oh, going in for the double are we!” followed by further awkwardness as you then try to work out whether you should continue going for the double or run away. Some French and Dutch people like a third kiss, just to confuse you. But not all French people: a few years ago a ‘Group for the Rehabilitation of the Single Kiss’ was set up in the city of Brest in Brittany, with the aim of defending citizens against the ‘exponential’ growth of double kissing. It’s a campaign we should revive.
If we are to take anything positive from the wreckage of the past year, surely it can be an end to air kissing? Boris Johnson has been encouraging people to be ‘cautious’ about their hugging practices, but there is surely room for a public information campaign on the physical and mental health risks of starting up with the stupid air kiss again. The beauty of a handshake is there is only really one way of doing it, and therefore much less room for things to go wrong and a meeting to start on the wrong foot. Or indeed the wrong hand.
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