Travellers arriving at York railway station yesterday were thrilled to discover that the trains weren’t running to Newcastle and there was a replacement bus service instead. As you can imagine, the mood was light-hearted – even festive. Think of the smiling faces, the gay laughter, the sense of fun that was rippling through the assembled crowd on the concourse. It was the perfect moment to inject a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek piss-take, and the people in charge (I use that phrase loosely) were equal to the task. Their brilliant wheeze: to have the replacement coaches arrive with the legend “Choo Choo i’m [sic] a train” emblazoned where one would normally find information about the destination.
No, I’m not making this up; yes, it actually happened. I have the photo to prove it. Somebody genuinely thought that: a) the situation called for some levity; and b) that this message was the appropriate way to achieve it. Either that or they had such contempt for their passengers that they simply decided to have some fun at the paying public’s expense, which is perhaps more likely.
It has become a truism that nothing in Britain now seems to work. This is bad enough. But what’s worse is the feeling that nobody who is purportedly in a position of power or authority seems particularly to care. In normal countries where adults are still in charge, the people who run the railways apologise to passengers for inconveniencing them, and feel a sense of shame for doing so. They don’t pretend that everybody is mates together and just in it for the ‘bantz’. They display a sense of decorum and recognise that when somebody is forking over a large sum of money for a long-distance train ticket, they’re owed a certain level of service. And, perhaps more importantly, they preserve a level of formal distance; they understand that the relationship between a professional and a client or customer is not the same as one between friends or acquaintances. You forgive a friend or acquaintance who is late, or lets you down, or irritates you in some small way. The expectation that you should do the same for a train company assumes an informal relationship where none has been granted on your part – a taken-for-granted over-familiarity which would be obnoxious enough in a pub bore, but borders on the genuinely insulting when performed by a commercial operator.
There is a word for this: it’s called impertinence. It’s an old-fashioned word, which is nowadays barely used – it sounds like the utterance of a Victorian gentleman sweeping aside a beggar with his cane or a mine owner dismissing his workers’ pleas for more gruel at lunch hour: “Damned impertinence!” To invoke it in the modern day makes one sound like Victor Meldrew, and leaves one open to accusations of pomposity or self-importance. We cringe at the prospect of being seen to be taking oneself too seriously.
But sometimes one needs to describe a phenomenon for which only one word will do, and this is precisely that kind of circumstance; trying to engage in “Choo Choo i’m a train” banter with passengers who one is already grossly inconveniencing simply is impertinent, and damnably so. You grant your friends and loved ones license to treat a situation with levity when you would rightfully otherwise be annoyed. For a train company to imply that it has that kind of relationship with you is frankly insulting. It isn’t taking oneself too seriously to object; it’s the natural reaction of a grown-up.
The wider point, of course, is that (as I’m sure you’ve noticed) we’ve now reached a situation in which even the pretence of caring about almost anything at all has been abandoned – in which it is rare to receive even a grudging apology when subjected to huge inconvenience. We’re expected to simply accept it with good humour and chortle along merrily with whatever japes we’re subjected to. This is strongly correlated with the gradual slide into entropy that has set in across the nation. As things collapse around our ears we might do well to consider a rethink. Maybe it’s about time we stopped worrying about sounding like Victor Meldrew, and started complaining a bit more. Maybe it’s about time to recognise that if you want to have a country in which things work properly, you have to stop accepting banter as a palliative to crap service. Maybe it’s about time we resurrected the concept of impertinence and started using that word a little bit more. Above all, maybe, just maybe, it’s about time we realised that the danger we face is not that of taking ourselves too seriously, but of not taking the business of living and getting things done seriously enough.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
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