MANNERS

A typically thoughtful post by Reihan Salam on the difficulties of blogging and being thin-skinned: "I'm just so convinced (wrongly, perhaps) that I'm a decent guy that I'm genuinely bummed when people electronically conclude that I should be stabbed."

Another etiquette story: a few days before she left for India, my wife rode her usual commuter train from Paddington. In one of the carriages, two heavily-built young black guys were playing a single hip-hop track over and over at deafening volume. People could hear it at the far end of the train. The noise droned on for around half-an-hour until the two amateur DJs got off at their stop. No one intervened or complained. Heads were buried in newspapers. My wife, who arrived home with a mini-migraine, thinks it would have been crazy to have tried anything, knowing the risks. I think I would have got a group of men together to ask for the music to be turned down. Then again, I wasn't travelling home, weary, on a train service that's maddeningly unreliable, with no conductor on board.