Touching on the British greeting

THE stiff upper lip and the formal handshake used to be about the only thing tactile about the British in public. Now every one of those lips is puckered up as if overdosed on collagen for the ubiquitous kiss of greeting and we hug and slap each other on the back sufficiently to make an Ivy League baseball team wince.

About the only symptom we haven't borrowed from the Americans is that dreadful whooping noise they make when things are going well. For small graces be thankful.

Things have not gone quite as far as to make the behaviour of one Scottish reporter for a Hong Kong newspaper here the norm. He greeted a senior Hong Kong Chinese official at a recent party with a huge slurping kiss on the cheeks, but he was well oiled at the time and that is another story.

There is no point in denying there is a lot more public kissing and hugging going on here now as elsewhere. So much so that pupils at a Scottish boarding school were warned by their headmaster this week that any of the opposite sex caught within six inches of each other will be disciplined.

The Dollar Academy, near Perth, brought in the rule because headmaster John Robertson was angered at seeing his pupils kissing and cuddling in the street.

In this context it was undoubtedly generous of the Green Party to give us all a simple lesson in the politically correct way of behaving towards each other in a tactile sense this week in a guide on the politically correct way to hug.