Читать книгу Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 9

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says Mrs Gibbs. ‘I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days, when you got a withering look for sucking on a throat lozenge in Woolworth’s. But this eating on the street does seem to have got out of hand. People are working their way through whole hot dinners.’

Perhaps she exaggerates just a little. But Zoe, young and carefree, is frequently to be seen in her lunch hour waving a plastic fork in one hand and holding a tinfoil tray full of carrot salad in the other – with not a few bits of carrot trailing on the pavement behind her. Others wield enormous door-step sandwiches and rolls whose contents are a challenge to control.

Then on the trains and buses you see people tucking in to fish-and-chip dinners, curry suppers, sweet-and-sour pork, spare ribs. London Transport thought there was enough of a problem in 2004 to launch an anti-smelly-food poster campaign featuring an Italian-looking man hung about with salamis and bits of Parma ham. This caused grave offence. The Italian ambassador was obliged to point out that these foods are not smelly.

Be that as it may, eating on the hoof isn’t very good for you and shows the minimum of respect for food. But that’s not the point. The old-fashioned idea that it just wasn’t dainty to eat in public might have been absurd but:

 The sight of people gnawing on huge filled rolls or trying awkwardly to eat chop suey from a tinfoil tray while walking along is rarely attractive.

 If you are struggling to eat this kind of food on the street, you are very likely to be in the way.

 In enclosed spaces, some people will think that what you’re eating smells horrible.

 Good walking food can be chocolate, ice cream, lollies, modestly filled sandwiches.

 If you want a picnic, why not find somewhere to sit down and have it properly?