As someone instilled with the British habit of automatic apology, I have often wished to be freed from the tyranny of good manners. The mildest kerfuffle tends to trigger in me an outburst of contrition, as uncontrollable as a sneezing fit. I find myself apologising in a forced high voice to the oaf who blunders into me in the street (“Sorry!”). Strangers are addressed with extravagant levels of courtesy: “Excuse me, I’m so sorry to interrupt, I wonder if you could possibly tell me the way to . . .”
If hypocrisy is the English vice, then manners are its public face. The polite patter of pleases and thank-yous with which we embroider our speech is a ritual show of courtesy, an unthinking way of advertising solicitude for the feelings of someone doing something for one. The relentless gratitude that I display in such settings — thanking shop assistants as though they have saved my life with the Heimlich manoeuvre, not simply handed me a chip-and-pin reader — is a salve for a guilty conscience.
The same is true of the contrition. There is much in British history for which to be sorry — especially from those of us who are its beneficiaries — such as the slave trade and colonising large swaths of the world. For all the reasons to be patriotic — real ale, cricket, Shakespeare, Led Zeppelin — the debit side of the ledger carries some serious bad karma.