The two C’s

Re­gret­tably, and not for the first time, I have spent most of my Christ­mas hol­i­days vis­it­ing the hos­pi­tal. And being a great be­liever in let­ting out any­thing that is play­ing on your mind rather than let­ting it gnaw away at you on the in­side, I will use this col­umn to air a griev­ance that sadly ap­pears, to me at any rate, to be linked to a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non of a gen­eral lack of cour­tesy and con­sid­er­a­tion for those around you.

But be­fore I get my teeth into that, let me just re­it­er­ate a sen­ti­ment that I have ex­pressed be­fore in this col­umn, and that is the ster­ling work being done by staff in the Cata­lan health sys­tem. I have al­ways found the admin staff, nurses and doc­tors in Cata­lan hos­pi­tals to be very pro­fes­sional and more than wor­thy of our re­spect for the in­cred­i­bly dif­fi­cult jobs they do deal­ing with mem­bers of the pub­lic who are gen­er­ally ei­ther ill, anx­ious or oth­er­wise suf­fer­ing and there­fore not the eas­i­est to have the nec­es­sary pa­tience with. Sadly for me and my fam­ily, these hol­i­days have been spent vis­it­ing the on­col­ogy de­part­ment, ob­vi­ously the most chal­leng­ing of work­places, and the nurses there gen­er­ally do an ex­cep­tional job.

So what’s my gripe this time? Well, a lack of cour­tesy and con­sid­er­a­tion, specif­i­cally in re­la­tion to the pub­lic use of smart­phones. I mean se­ri­ously, what I’ve wit­nessed in the hos­pi­tal wait­ing room and even in the shared room of the per­son I’ve been vis­it­ing these days has been stag­ger­ing. Peo­ple play­ing videos or hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with the speak­er­phone on with­out any ear­phones so that every­one around has to lis­ten to it. Now, let’s be clear here, due to the smart­phone cul­ture we are im­mersed in, this is a phe­nom­e­non found every­where nowa­days, and I have often been sub­jected to teenagers in the UK play­ing their music loudly on trains in what I call a “look at me mother” state­ment of de­fi­ance to the world. But that’s not what I’m talk­ing about. That’s a con­scious at­tempt to annoy peo­ple as an ex­pres­sion of re­bel­lion, and a lot of teenagers must go through that until they learn bet­ter about being part of a com­mu­nity. What I’m talk­ing about here is adults, and often older adults, seem­ingly un­aware that the noise em­a­nat­ing from their smart­phone, be it a noisy home­made Christ­mas video, a music video, or even the voice of the other caller on speak­er­phone, is being heard by all around them.

The cul­tural el­e­ment of this is the obliv­i­ous­ness. I was raised in a world where you were taught to be cour­te­ous and con­sid­er­ate of those around you, and I’ve pre­vi­ously lived in cul­tures - the UK, the US, Ger­many, Japan - where such man­ners were also val­ued and per­pet­u­ated by gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion (if you’ve ever been to Japan, you’ll know how ex­ag­ger­at­edly con­sid­er­ate they are of other peo­ple, al­most far­ci­cally so in com­par­i­son with other cul­tures).

I’ve often used this col­umn to praise the many pos­i­tive things about liv­ing here; what would make it even bet­ter would be a bit more cour­tesy and con­sid­er­a­tion, in my opin­ion. There, I feel a bit bet­ter now.