John Humphrys: My study of manners Dream on. What I actually did was suffer in silence, along with everyone else. Well, you never know, do you? She might have exploded in anger and rammed a chopstick in my ear and the other passengers would, of course, have looked the other way. We almost always look the other way. Now, I do not claim that one selfish woman eating her dinner on a Tube train heralds the end of civilisation. But there is a lot of this disregard for the feeling of others doing the rounds. A friend told me he was walking his dog on the pavement the other day when a middle-aged woman rammed her bicycle wheel into the back of his legs. He turned. She snapped: "I'm not going to apologise. You were walking far too slowly! Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative Chief Whip, allegedly forgot his manners in an exchange with police Every time I tell one of these tales, I've been trumped by someone else with a worse one. My Today colleague Jim Naughtie told me a classic mobile phone horror story. The offender this time was a smart young lawyer who destroyed the peace of her fellow passengers on a long train journey by bellowing into her mobile nonstop and so loudly it was impossible for everyone in the carriage not to listen. And then one of the passengers (Jim insists it wasn't him but I have my doubts) sent her a text. It read something like: "As a result of being forced to listen to your conversation for the past two hours I now know a great deal about your private and professional life, including your name, phone number and credit card details. I have noted them down and rest assured I shall make good use of them if you do not shut up immediately. She went berserk, charging up and down the carriage demanding to know who had texted her. And the wonderful, glorious life-enhancing outcome was that not only did no one own up but everyone told her to shut up and sit down. Oh, to have been there. But one swallow does not herald a well-mannered spring. Manners matter if we are to preserve any notion of protecting our public spaces. We could start with swearing. Tricky, I know, given that the airwaves aren't exactly immune from it - though naturally it's only ever allowed for reasons of artistic effect or verisimilitude and never, ever, simply to shock. Heaven forfend. I think it's sometimes called "being edgy." Whatever we call it, it's dispiriting to hear so many people in every other park and shopping centre demonstrating that no sentence can be complete without at least one "F" word and doing it so loudly it's impossible to escape their boorishness. I accept that not everyone agrees with me about swearing. Stephen Fry doesn't. He's on record as saying it is a really important part of life and people who can't see that are "mad, silly and prissy." I've tried to see it that way, really I have. Doesn't do any harm does it? These are just silly old conventions. What we find offensive today will probably be entirely acceptable tomorrow. Maybe, but it's today we are concerned with. Youngsters who swear loudly in front of a teacher in a classroom or a policeman on the street are well aware that it is causing offence. That's why they do it. Yes, language evolves endlessly. That's the glorious thing about it. It's also true that there's no logic in regarding the arrangement of a group of letters in one way as perfectly benign and in another way as hugely offensive. Nobody would make a fuss if someone said "fluck" would they? For many Irish people "feck" is acceptable. But that also misses the point. It's not a matter of logic. It is the intention behind the word's use that matters. The clothing firm French Connection UK garnered millions of pounds worth of free publicity in 1997 by "discovering" (yeah ... right) the acronym of its initials and plastering them over T-shirts. I spent a year making a BBC Two documentary about the state of education in Britain and if I took away one single incontestable fact it was that the schools where the teachers were respected were the schools that delivered the best education. And "respect" meant the children did not swear in their presence. Ever. National treasure with a brain the size of Jupiter Mr Fry may be, but I'd love to have heard him explaining his barmy ideas to those teachers. Which takes us, inevitably, to the gates of Downing Street and the reaction of the police to a cabinet minister's colourful language. It was not the first time the Police Federation had been upset this year. It was extremely cross with a High Court judge, Mr Justice Bean, when he quashed a magistrates" court conviction of a young man who had been fined £50 for repeatedly swearing at two police officers. The swear words, said the judge, were heard "all too frequently" by officers on duty and so were unlikely to have caused "harassment, alarm or distress." He's right on both counts. I struggle with the image of a policeman dissolving into tears because he has heard a young tough telling someone to F-off on the street but I have no difficulty imagining a timid old lady being both alarmed and distressed. Maybe future generations of old people will become inured to it in the same way as today's hard-nosed police officers and they'll tell the yobs to F-off in return, but I don't relish the thought. Gary Cooper, the professor of organisational psychology and pro-vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, says we are witnessing "an exercise in civic frustration: At the root of it is the hard times we are going through... People feel financial insecurity, job insecurity. They feel social insecurity and project it on to other people. Well, maybe there's something in that, but it sounds like a pretty poor excuse rather than an explanation. Quite why insecurity should be expressed in loutish behaviour at this juncture in our history is puzzling. I can just about remember the austerity years immediately after the last war when hardship and insecurity were on a different scale altogether, when the poorest kids would pick up an apple core if you dropped it in the street and their homes would have packing cases for furniture and they shivered in the winter because they did not own a decent coat. The mood was ugly then - but in a different way. The anger was directed towards the ruling class, rather than towards fellow citizens in the public space. Not that nostalgia ever solved anything. What has changed so dramatically since then is that society has succumbed to the strange affliction of emotional incontinence. Its symptoms have been appearing for the past couple of decades - probably since the disease manifested itself with the bizarre overreaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. Since then blubbing has become compulsory - even for the victors of a golf match, for God's sake. Did you see them sobbing away when they won the Ryder Cup? One wonders how they'd have coped if they'd lost. Letting it all hang out: public grief for Diana, Princess of Wales (JEFF GILBERT) Maybe it's the presence of the television cameras. With its insatiable appetite for sad souls desperate to become famous by humiliating themselves in front of the cameras, the new version of reality television gave a license to the kind of public behaviour that would once have been regarded as shaming. Compare the first programmes, which offered some genuine insight into human interaction, with the freak show it was to become. The notion that restraint might ever be desirable was put to the torch. The lasting effect is that no light entertainment television show is complete today without somebody - ideally lots of people - shrieking or weeping or preferably both. Or swearing. Restraint tends to be sneered at. The stiff upper lip is derided. We're even told that several of David Cameron's former ministers blubbed when he told them during the reshuffle that their services were no longer required. Bless. How desperately dated seems the attitude of those few surviving men and women who fought in the Second World War and whom we still hear occasionally speaking with such dignity and, usually, reluctance about what happened to them. I've just been listening to a woman describing on Radio 4 how her mother kept her alive in the Burmese jungle when they were being chased by Japanese soldiers. She was the only child in her group to survive. Her mother was heroic and she never spoke about what had happened. There is a clear line connecting restraint and respect, and the loss of both have contributed to the uglier mood in the nation which is, in turn, illustrated by the loss of manners. Yobs defacing war memorials are at the extreme end of the scale - a relatively new phenomenon. Maybe they are just too thick to understand the concept of gratitude to the men and women who gave their lives, or perhaps causing offence is an end in itself. Or maybe their horizons are limited to their own existence - like the weekend drunks urinating and vomiting in the street; the boorish passengers and the selfish drivers and the shouty mothers who use their babies" buggies as battering rams and the kids with their feet on the train seats and all the others who make life miserable for people trying to go about their daily business in the public space. And it's not only individuals. Why shouldn't manners be observed by the companies who don't give a damn how much of your time they waste by forcing you to wait on the line, then treat you like a vexatious moron when you ask, very politely, whether they might please provide you with the service for which you've paid so handsomely? And, no, it doesn't help to be called "John" by people I've never met and have absolutely no wish to meet. Nor do I want to hear my colleagues on radio and television or nurses on hospital wards referring to old people by their first names - simply because they're old. That one is probably a losing battle, but it's still worth fighting. Or maybe the whole war has been lost. Maybe it doesn't matter. To restate the question with which I began this little rant: who needs manners? We can get by perfectly well without them. True, but wouldn't it be a nicer world with them? John Humphrys contributes to How Rude! Modern Manners Defined, published by Waitrose, £8.99, available from Waitrose shops.