Manners? what the hell are those?

I have decided that I am now officially old. I can remember a time when Chappies Bubblegum was half a cent for one. Now they are 25 cents for one. Talk about inflation. Et cetera.

But what about manners?

I know that no family actually sits down at a dinner table anymore for a family meal to talk about their day, or eats with silver cutlery. Never mind using more than one knife and fork for starters, fish, and desert... What? Mommy, this knife is broken. It is a strange shape. And why is this fork more like a spoon? People now days don't recognise different cutlery or even know what it is used for. And what about standing back at doors or giving up seats for old people?

I have realised that manners have gone the way of the Dodo. That is to say - they are not only dead, but extinct with absolutely NO CHANCE of coming back. Not even with heroic measures and gene therapy, or finding little blobs of it left in amber and creating islands where it can mutate.

Manners are gone. If I hold a door for people they not only strean through and ignore me, but hordes of others stream through after them. I have now taken to proclaiming in a loud voice "it is a pleasure", followed by a sotto vocce "you ignorant plebs" or (depending on my mood) something that would require an age restiction. And doors are not the only place this happens. In supermarkets, if you stand back for people in the aisles, they will push their trolleys in front of you and stand there blocking your view of the produce, and then proceed to look at their lists, talk on the phone, pick their noses, or do just about anything else they can think of to be annoying.

I don't know if people are rude or just stupid. Juding by the way they drive out of hte parking lot, I'd say the latter, but that is another story for another time.

Here's to the few gentlemen there are left - that hold the doors for me, and are surprised when I thank them. You are my heros. If you weren't married, I'd ask you myself.