In the Wall Street Journal today there is a wonderful piece by an American tourist struck by the level of friendliness and civility he found amongst the British people. He starts with our tube etiquette:
‘Three times in the space of 24 hours young men offered their subway seats to my wife, who is neither elderly nor pregnant. They seemed to do this out of a sense that giving up one’s seat to a person at least one generation older was the sort of thing gentlemen did, even though not one of them fit the narrow technical definition of a gentleman. One guy looked like a gangster.’
‘At the Kensington High Street tube station, we had trouble figuring out the Oyster Card transit payment system. A very young Underground employee, noticing our confusion, offered to insert the coins for us. This sort of thing never happens in New York, where being perplexed is viewed as a sign of mental impairment.’
‘When my wife asked a young man on the train to turn down his MP3 device because the noise coming through his dirt-cheap earphones was so loud and annoying, he did not disfigure her with a machete. Instead, he apologized for his insensitivity. So did the woman who had her cellphone on speaker. The train employees were both cordial and informative. Met anybody like that on Amtrak lately?’
And finally, post office in Stroud:
In the market town of Stroud, a clerk walked about a quarter-mile across a supermarket to show me where the sparkling water was. But the real capper was when I visited the post office In my suburban New York town there is a post-office employee so belligerent that people drive to the next town to ship their packages.
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