I have a friend at Aer Lingus. Apparently. Well, I must have, because a while back I received an e-mail confirmation of an online booking which began "Dear . . ." and then my first name.
It wasn't signed so I can't, as I would naturally wish to, send back a thank-you card with an attractive picture - perhaps a bunch of begonias in a Clarice Cliff vase or two kittens playing with a ball of wool, and saying something like: "Dear Seamus (or Jacinta or whoever), thank you so much for your kind e-mail confirming my reservation. It really was most thoughtful of you and is much appreciated. I do hope it won't be long before we meet again. Or indeed for the first time. Yours ever. . ."
Is the national airline so devoid of friends that it can't transact its business with customers without getting offensively up close and personal? (Just in passing, I could almost swear that once, at the end of one flight, I heard the air hostess say: "When leaving the aircraft, be sure to take your personal longings with you." Could that be a clue?)
Palsy-walsy experience
I had the same sort of palsy-walsy experience with a certain financial concern it was my misfortune to have to telephone. "Would you mind addressing me by my surname?" I found myself having to say to the nameless, faceless call-centre minion-ette at the other end.
"Not at all," she said readily, as if she was all too used to this kind of request and was already primed to file me under "Harmless Cranks". Same thing the other day in a conversation with some dork in a bank.
Then there was the greetings card from a credit-card operation, thanking me for my "support" over the years. Support? What kind of support? Psychological? Emotional? I can assure that company that my relationship with it was strictly mercenary (and is now, incidentally, ended. Don't get me started).
What the devil is going on here? I can't help thinking of the Alan Bennett sketch where he's dictating a telegram to an over-familiar operator and feels obliged to advise her: "I fear we may be drifting into a relationship of somewhat redundant intimacy." Nicely put, and I must copy it out and leave it beside my telephone.
I suppose all this fatuous informality on every hand has something to do with the notorious Irish "friendliness" that Bord Fáilte and the other tourism organisations (including Aer Lingus which, if memory serves, used to boast of itself as the "Friendly Airline") have ruthlessly merchandised for years.
National infantilism
Friendliness, your granny. Any fool can see it's nothing but a kind of national infantilism. You know, the sort that leads the passengers to applaud when the aircraft lands.
There has been some comment of late that, since the Celtic Tiger got its septic claws into us, people in general have become less friendly. Good. It's time they grew up. This immediate, uncritical opening up to the stranger so characteristic of our peasantry, rural and urban, is nothing more than a pathetic, sleveen pleading to be liked.
So here is a primer for all those hand-licking spaniels out there. The mature attitude to meeting or contracting with strangers is to preserve a certain dignified distance until one is assured of the stranger's bona fides; then, of course, to be as friendly and hospitable as you deem appropriate to the occasion.
One doesn't want to go to the other extreme, like they used to in Austria, where a woman could find an invitation addressed to, for example, "Frau Witwe Professor Heinrich Palffy" (Madame the Widow of the Late Professor Heinrich Palffy). But even if we don't have the necessary quarterings, let's have a little mannerly formality.
Commercial transactions
And especially in commercial transactions. An inappropriate casualness subverts the dignity of proper address when that is what is called for. Let us treat our interlocutors civilly as the service-providers they are, and hopefully efficient ones, and let us be able to expect the same in return. Courtesy all round, by all means, but enough of this bogus bosom-pals shtick.
I expect the Diary editor was looking for warm, touchy-feely, goodwill-to-all-men contributions appropriate to this festive season, and not a hissy fit like this. Well, all right, I'm sorry I called that woman a minion-ette, and that chap a dork, but somebody has to be the Grinch That Stole Christmas.