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  • While politeness is, of course, always preferable to rudeness.

  • There are ways of being polite, that badly miss the mark

  • and can leave us feeling oddly detached and dissatisfied.

  • Picture the person who ends up, despite their best efforts,

  • seeming what we can call "coldly polite".

  • They may be extremely keen to please those they're seeing.

  • They obey all the rules of etiquette, they offer their guest drinks, ask them questions about their journey,

  • suggest they might want a little more gravy, remark on the interest of a recent prize winning novel.

  • And yet, they never manage to make their hospitality feel either engaging or memorable.

  • It may be a long time, before another meeting with them is suggested.

  • By contrast, there is the person we recognize as a warm, who follows the cold person in the basic principles of politeness,

  • but manages to add a critical, emotionally comforting ingredient to their manner.

  • They might, when we have an evening plan with them, suggest making toasted cheese sandwiches at their place

  • rather than going out to a restaurant.

  • They might chat to us through the bathroom door;

  • put on the songs they loved dancing to when they were fourteen;

  • plump up a cushion, and slot it behind our back;

  • confess to feeling intimidated by mutual acquaintance;

  • bring us a posy of daisies, or a card they made;

  • call us up when we're down with a flu and ask how our ears are feeling;

  • mention they like our haircut, and then when we spill something or fart by mistake exclaim

  • "I'm so glad you did that, it is usually me".

  • Beneath the difference between the warm and the cold person,

  • lies a contrasting vision of human nature.

  • Broadly, the cold person is operating with an implicit view that those they are attempting to please

  • are creatures endowed only with the highest needs.

  • As a result, all kinds of assumptions are made about them

  • That they are interested exclusively in so called "serious topics",

  • specially art and politics.

  • That they will appreciate a degree of formality in dining and sitting;

  • that they will be strong, self-contained and mature enough, never to have any hunger for reassurence or cosiness,

  • and that they will be without urgent physical vulnerabilities and drives.

  • which might prove deeply offensive if they were mentioned.

  • These higher beings would, the cold host believes, wins if someone suggested they curl up on the sofa with a blanket

  • or handed them a copy of magazine about filmstars when they headed for the bathroom.

  • Yet, the warmly polite person is always deeply aware that the stranger irrespective of their status or outward dignity

  • is a highly needy, fragile, confused, appetitive and susceptible creature.

  • And they know this about the stranger because they never forget this about themselves.

  • Warmly polite people have much in common with the character Kanga, the tenderly maternal kangaroo in A. A. Milne's "Winnie-the-pooh" books.

  • In one of the stories the little animals are deeply disconcerted by the arrival in the Hundred Acre Wood of Tigger,

  • who's very big, very loud and bouncy and assertive.

  • They treat him with caution and are, we might say, coldly polite.

  • But when Tigger finally meets Kanga, she is immediately warm with him.

  • She thinks of him in much the same terms as she does her own child Roo.

  • Just because an animal is large, it doesn't mean he doesn't want kindness.

  • "However big Tigger seems to be, remember that he wants as much kindness as Roo.", says Kanga.

  • In what might be a definition of the essence of the philosophy of warmth.

  • Sometimes it is deeply generous to think that another person may be more elevated than us.

  • Collectively, we've taken this thought very much to heart.

  • We've internalized distance and learned caution, moving on from the naivety of the small child

  • who wonders sweetly, when you're sad, if you might like to sniff their grimy blanket.

  • But the warm person knows that however solid and dignified someone appears on the outside,

  • behind the scenes there will inevitably be a struggling self.

  • Potentially awkward, easily bemused, beset by physical appetites, on the verge of loneliness and frequently in need of nothing more subtle or elevated

  • than a cheese sandwich, a glass of milk and a hug.

While politeness is, of course, always preferable to rudeness.

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