Manners Maketh The Man

...or not, as the case may be.

This is a meme that's been churning over in my mind for at least eight years now and it's been growing as more and more evidence gets piled on. It's actually one of the reasons I created this blog, to get this garbage off my chest and to stop wasting spare mental CPU cycles on it.

I had sort of decided to take a responsible aproach to this, to do some fairly thorough research and make sure I have a balanced view of the issue, to make sure that when I spout fairly strong opinions I'm able to back them up and to defend myself. But then I though "Ah, bollocks. Just do it." Let someone correct me if I'm wrong (http://xkcd.com/386).

The thing is this. Icelanders like to think they're all sophisticated and worldly-wise and up with the Jónssons, and able to proudly rub shoulders with their Nordic and even Scandinavian counterparts, and have even had some fairly respectable HDI ratings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdi) to back it up recently.

But it's all bollocks! They're behaving like a bunch of social savages. The most generous I can be would be to describe them as a group of teenagers left home alone for a weekend. If countries were to be judged by their standards of etiquette and manners -and let's face it, they do sometimes get judged simply that way; isn't it called diplomacy?- Iceland would fail miserably.

I now I'm making some bold statements and quite frankly I find it rather difficult to give a toss who I upset: the truth needs to out. The people of this little skerry which I hold so dear are woefully behind in terms of social evolution and are making bloody fools of themselves because of it. I've been here long enough to work out what's going on and to see what most people are like, and here I present a brief list of common problems. Most of them stem from differences between social norms in Iceland and the way in which I was raised -a fairly middle-of-the-road Anglo-Saxon way- and of course we can debate at length the extent to which these conventions apply or not in Iceland.

In fact I'll go so far as to warn you, Icelanders: in this case you can't escape the truth or you social responsibility by crowing out the tired old mantra of "oh, but it's different here! We do things differently here because we're all so special and live in a special place and we're not like anyone else!". Bollocks. Utter horse manure. When it comes to how you interact with each other in your tiny little farm in the Westfjords you can do what you want, but in the modern paradigm Iceland is no longer so isolated that you can pretend that you have no contact with the outside world. You travel. People visit here, a lot, and pay damn good money for which they expect a certain internationally accepted standard of etiquette and manners. So invoking the "we're special because we sing like whales, eat stinky food and believe in elves" cry again is not going to cut it here.

There many aspects of the Icelanders' behaviour that merit comment, but for now I'm going to focus on matters of manners and etiquette; other quirks are big enough to merit their own blogs, not least becase a few of them tie neatly together into explanations of aspects of the national conscience.

What I present here is a straightforward guide for Icelanders to finally be as as cultured as they like to pretend they are whilst having a meal.

Mark my words carefully here: I write "having a meal" because to use the word "dining" would not be accurate. My fellow skerry-dwellers eat far too fast. A typical rythmn goes: cut, stab with fork, deliver to mouth, then whilst chewing, start cutting the next morsel. Not only is this downright rude, it's also antisocial and unhealthy. Where's the conversation? Where's the efficiant mastication? Isn't it the case that over half of the process of digestion should take place in the mouth?

I've been trying to get to the bottom of this and I've found out two or three reasons why people eat like hungry dogs here: i) They actively get taught to do so in infant and primary school. They get taught not to 'hang over' their food, and to hurry outside to play, ii) In a society in which everyone's a farmer (which Iceland was, just a few generations ago) and the growing season is very short, followed by fierce winters, there is no space for relaxed social dining during which the issues of the moment are ruminated as well as the food, and iii) whereas real countries like France or Germany or the UK or the USA have had anything from a few hundred to a few thousand years to develop social norms and etiquette, Iceland has had the social equivalent of about ten minutes. Social evolution here has simply been way too pragmatic to allow for such luxuries as civilised dining to develop.

The message in this case is very simple: cut your bite, put it in your mouth, then put your cutlery down. Chew slowly and carefully before swallowing, then when and only when your mouth is empty, may you speak.

Which takes us neatly on to the next faux pas that I see every day here. Literally every day. For some reason my beloved countrymen haven't learned that it's rude to talk with your mouth full of food. Eating lunch in the kitchen in my small company is a daily horror not only because of the turgidly boring food choice on offer, but mainly because of the animalistic display of behaviour. One particular employee, a middle-aged kerling with a face so sour that she looks like she is smelling someone else's fart, is a chief offender. Her normal talking voice is a high-piched Gatling variant of Icelandic but she continues with a mouth full of food and the effect is dreadful: she looks downright ignorant. I shudder to think how fellow diners at, for example, even a mid-range restaurant in Lyon, Geneva or Tokyo would react. What makes it worse is that she is far from the only offender; half the employees and even the CEO behave exactly the same way.

For heaven's sake, people, don't talk with your mouth full of food. It's disgusting and you look like white trash.

Fairly soon after I moved here I was 'dining' with family. As I raised my forkful of food to my mouth, the diner to my immediate right reached forward and left, leaning her body heavily against mine, and stretched across my personal space to where the water jug stood in the centre of the table. The food fell off my fork. I remember being shocked by this and wondering what sort of person this was, then as the weeks and years rolled by I saw that this was common behaviour here.

There really is no conception of personal space during dining, and hence no respect for it. The way in which I was raised -which I by no means hold up as a global standard, just normal- taught me that people do not touch each other during dinner. Everyone has their own personal space, elbows do not touch, knees do not touch under the table and one never, ever reaches across another person at the table: one asks to be passed whatever is needed.

The absence of this meme is again fairly obvious when one looks back into Icelandic history. Visit the wonderful Skogar Folk Museum and take a walk around their old buildings, go inside the beautifully built longhouse in þjórsádalur and you'll quickly understand that there simply was no space in these dwellings, so it's no surprise that the idea never sprung up.

But come on, people. You don't live in turf houses any more. You live in generic, generously-proportioned, Ikea-furnished, geothermally-heated houses and apartments now and the architects always plan nicely for a real dining table with place for everyone. I know; I've seen the plans. Learn the simple rules and stop behaving like apes while you eat.
There are quite a few more of these finer points of dining, but they seem so trivial, perhaps they really are just vestigial graces inherited from some Victorian or renaissance times, that trying to correct them seems folly.

I'll instead simply list them and their corrected versions:

When you've finished eating, the only time your cutlery should show on the clockface of your plate is six o' clock. Knife and fork together, straight up and down the middle of the plate. Leaving them at some jaunty twenty-past eight nonsense just exposes your sloth and lack of social graces.

Wiping your mouth on anything other than your napkin or serviette is horrible. Using a napkin ain't rocket science: when you sit down, unfold it into your lap. Use it, replace it in your lap. When you're finished, fold it neatly, preferrably with the now-stained section inside, and leav it next to your plate.

By all means gulp your drink; try to get as much into your body as you can between bites... ...if you want to look like an alcoholic, or someone who derives their pleasure mainly from visceral, central-nervous sources like feeling your stomach stretching. Sip.

If you want something to be passed to you, ask for it by name. There is -as far as I'm aware- no shortage of air or words in The Land, so you're free to be as verbose as you want when asking for something. Don't just point and grunt; you look stupid when you do that.

The absence of the custom of waiting for one's fellow diners to be served before starting owes as much to the almost complete lacky of social empathy here as it does to anything else. Suffice it to say that it's extremely rare to see people acknowledge this custom and most people don't even seem to notice how fragmented it makes the whole dining  experience.

Icelanders, I have noticed in the last n years, have almost no sense of how their actions affect those around them They have an almost sociopathic disregard for other people, and this failure to wait for other diners is a classic example. This delightfully chewy and richly flavoured topic may or may not be the subject of a future blog.

Enough for now; my Rant Mode alarm is sounding and I really must save some content for future blogs.

Twitter

I've created a Tvitterrrrrr account, as my Icelandic friends would call it, delightfully trilling the 'r' and not caring that they haven't a clue how to pronounce the 'w' properly. On Twitter I can be found under @thecodwars.

The surprisingly poor distinction between 'w' and 'v' amongst the Icelanders is a source of much wasted intellectual energy for me. How can one nation get it so wrong? How can they care so little about sounding silly?

The answer lies possibly in the difference in naming: whereas in English the letter bears the name 'double-u', in Icelandic it's called 'tvöfaldvaff', or 'double-v'.

I am much vexed about this issue. I hope to remember to write more about it later.

Jæja...

The time to start has finally come.

I make no predictions or promises about the content of this blog. I'm trying to avoid stating a purpose more noble than simply venting my spleen.

I reserve the right to blend Icelandic into my writings; I've been here long enough to do so with sang froid and I don't necessarily care if I get my spelling or grammar wrong. None of my petty crimes again the noble language can be as heinous as the day-to-day abuse meted out by the Icelanders on their own language: the tök orð, the pretentious use of Danish and the woefully poor grasp of even basic English.

And, you know what? I don't care if I don't hold the moral high ground. I care less than I care about the horror of starting not only a sentence but a whole paragraph with the word 'and'. I don't claim to be perfect in any way whatsoever, so IMHO that leaves me the option of being as contradictory and hypocritical as I want.