Daniel Craig got it in the neck last week because a photograph appeared to show him failing to share his umbrella with his fiancée, Satsuki Mitchell. It was a pretty tenuous criticism as the picture wasn't clear: he wasn't hogging it, but then again she wasn't particularly under it. Maybe milliseconds later he'd swept her to safety. Then again perhaps he'd just murmured: 'Get out of my space, bitch. My undampened face is my fortune.' But then she might like the rain and hate being constricted under the clammy spans of a patriarchal society - Craig knows better than to make the patronising offer of shelter. After all, in the picture she's grinning. But maybe it's the brave grin of someone hiding pain, neglect: "I'm alright really!" she's begging us to think. "Deep down he cares!"
Whatever the truth of the situation, people seem very clear that James Bond wouldn't have got himself into it. Bond's far too gallant for that, they say - he knows how to treat a lady. I don't know where they get this idea from, as all we've seen James Bond do is shoot or have sex with people (sometimes the same people, although thankfully not in that order) and - in Quantum of Solace - mope about. The main thing about James Bond is that he doesn't give a shit what anyone thinks. He's a bit of a dick, really - not someone you'd want to end up next to at a dinner party - but he keeps saving the world, so, you know, fair enough.
But anyone looking at James Bond and thinking, 'That's what I call a real man' couldn't be more wrong. That's what you call a fictional man - he faces none of the predicaments with which real men like Daniel Craig have to cope. 'Go in there, kill the bad guys, save the girl and disable the nuke,' doesn't present a dilemma. You've just got to have a go and hope you're good enough. Even Craig's new 'Bond with emotions' never has to deal with anything as awkward as being seen to shelter but not condescendingly cosset a woman in rainy conditions. He's never been in an etiquette minefield, just an ordinary minefield. He has no idea what it's like to be a real man.
I do know what it's like; it's extremely tricky. We live in a society where all the old conventions of manners have been broken down but not quite destroyed - they're left hanging around in sharp bits like a kind of offence shrapnel. It gets embedded in anyone not as immune to other people's opinions as James Bond.
The clichéd example is the question of holding doors open: you know, are men supposed to hold doors open for women? Are women supposed to mind if they do? If encountering double doors in a corridor with a stranger of either gender following, what is the separating yardage below which you're expected to wait with the door open to avoid it slamming back in their face and above which, if you do wait, you look like an idiot and force the follower to break into a jog?
No new convention has evolved. I don't know anyone sensible who gives a damn whether they have to open doors for people or always have them opened by others. We don't care what the convention is - we're happy to expend whatever effort it asks of us - but we're desperate, crying out for a new consensus.
Greeting people causes the worst dilemmas. I actually worry about it in advance of social encounters. Who are you supposed to kiss (and how many times), who hug and whom shake hands with? I'm pretty repressed but I'll happily kiss, hug - and, indeed, squeeze on the arse - anyone who requires it of me if that will make the encounter pass off without incident. Equally I'm not offended, or surprised, if people would rather I didn't touch them at all. I don't care, I just want to know.
But none of us knows. So we end up doing mortifying dances of half-handshaking, half-kissing as one party backtracks from the unexpected kiss and the other is at pains to imply that of course a kiss would have been completely welcome. Will no one help us
Few governments have passed as many laws as this one and yet a quick Greetings Act, that would avoid millions of moments of embarrassment a year, that would save the nation's hearts from pumping thousands of gallons of blood into its faces, is too much trouble. How about this: if they've already met, women always kiss one another (both cheeks), men and women ditto, men shake hands unless they've met 12 times in which case they hug; people who haven't already met shake hands? Will that do? Can that be the law? Please?
All of the above is complicated by the fluctuating conventions of sexual attraction. I'm not talking about genuine sexual attraction, but the strange rule, from which the 'men kiss women but not one another' idea surely derives, that men are supposed to express mild sexual interest in all women. There's a general 'Aren't the ladies lovely?' presumption that's very rude not to go along with, but worse to be seen to overplay.
It must be implied that a man finds any woman attractive, but not that he's going to jump her. And how far he is allowed to go in adhering to this rule depends on many factors, primarily the man's age and his marital status. A happily married man of late middle-age can practically goose a woman and it carries no more force than a twentysomething complimenting her hair.
Now I know I'm coming across like a cold, irritable, hand-wringing weirdo - but people like me need rules or we have to think too much about things that don't really matter. Conventions of politeness oil the wheels of social interaction - they make things easy in the 99 per cent or more of occasions when people don't want to upset one another. Everyone knows what to do when they want to be rude, but wouldn't it help if we could sort out a system for the majority of times when we don't?
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