Manners maketh small men, and also Mummies

We're back on track. And it's cooler in winter so I can jog again which has transformed my state of mind. My little i-watch tells me I haven't run anywhere since April 16th, 2016, so it's about time. And this is a backdrop canvas like none other. Down the hill, the Garden of Gethsemane on the left with its ancient olive trees - squat, gnarled and girthy, bathed in winter sunlight. Up around the Old City Wall opposite the Jewish cemetery which has converted one side of the Mount of Olives into a chalky white cubic morass. Up around the back of Al Aqsa Mosque where Ultra Orthodox black-hatted Jews are clambering out of minibuses: unfolding baby buggies and flooding in the gate of the Old City nearest to the Western Wall. The swifts will soon be back I think as I search the streaky blue-pink sky for the now familiar black silhouette of little winged sprites.

St Grace is back home giving the brood their dinner while I run free for 40 minutes. Nothing in my hands. Nothing pulling on my arms. No weight on my back or my shoulders. And sights and scenes gliding by to a soundtrack of my choice.

The lights begin to ping on all around, and the dusk call to prayer begins to echo. As I pass the New Gate, the Christmas tree is almost entirely undressed - just a bare frame and a star now visible above the wall. And as I run down the slope the other side, gasping with relief to have finished all the uphill bits, young East Jerusalemites do somersaults in the air from a standstill on the grass outside Damascus gate. I clap. So do they. Sirens sound. I pass the police hut now a permanent fixture in this temporamental political climate. I count on two hands the number of people that have jumped, nervy, looking behind them as I approach. This is a city very much on edge.

Earlier in the day the dwarfs and I have been discussing manners. Rashimi has his grumpy little grumps at the moment, and I try and explain that it only makes the day more painful for all of us, particularly him, if he's rude. So the Lozenge suggests a manners chart and then expands: 'actually Mummy, it's not all the time that YOU are polite to US either. Like sometimes you don't alwayth say PLEATHE when you want us to get dressed or brush teeth, and you did shout two times this morning.'

Manners maketh small men. And also Mummies. So it turns out. 'And Mummy,' adds Rashimi. 'If you get five gold stars in a row on your manners chart, then I'll give you a bottle of wine. All to yerself. Which you can drink with a straw and you don't have to share it.'

The next morning, as I eat my toast behind the cereal packet so the Pea doesn't see, otherwise she eats all of my breakfast as well as her own, I see the manners charts are stuck up on the door.

And I think I'd really like to put one in the White House for its next (P)resident. But I don't think he'd be getting his personal bottle.

I read Maureen Lipman's piece 'If I ruled the World' (I think it was her) a while ago in a magazine. She said the thing she would concentrate on if she was in charge of everyone would be manners. Her point was that manners are the top of all essential human virtues, and linked to every other important one. Empathy. Tolerance. Kindness. Generosity. Patience. All the things we often feel are so lacking in a city, or the world stage, where push and shove are a shoddy replacement for please and thank you.

I was also reading in the New York Times about Obama's letters - how during his double term as President he had a huge team of people working 'underground' sorting through every letter that came in. They would separate them into appropriate bunches: hundreds and hundreds of them each day; until by the end of each working day they'd have ten left, which the President himself would reply to. Because his point that every letter was important, because each one was from a person; an individual. Now that's manners. How his legacy will be missed.

And like Meryl Streep said in her speech about Trump's rudeness towards the disabled journalist. 'Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence'.  It all goes back to manners.

I like how the shop floor is also keeping check on the duty officer in our household situation. We should be doing the same on a global level.

And I will be saying a big thank you to my small housemates when I get my bottle of wine with the straw.