Forms of greeting at social gatherings were, he rationalised, a fashion and thus, like the mini-skirt, of limited duration. If so he hoped the existing style, of kissing the air in the vicinity of one another’s ear- hole, would hurry on by.
He had consulted friends better acquainted with etiquette concerning these vacuous kisses, who advised him (whether rightly is not certain) that it was the fashion in Western Europe. The English gave two, the Dutch three and the French (or at least the Roman Catholics among them) four.
Nationalist sentiment always bubbling under the homogenised face that the European Union tries to present of Europe, he lived in terror that an impulse to one-upmanship would take root in this area. The trend would then reduce him to bob-bob-bobbing away half the evening when he could be more gainfully employed downing the cocktails, guzzling the canapes, or whatever.
He tried to anticipate this eventuality by developing a finger wiggle of the sort that, he had been advised, was the preferred greeting style of Hawaiians, but gave it up for fear of being accused of soliciting. The greeting that caused him the most difficulty was that of “how do you do?” reduced, of course, in these genial times to “how are you?” and phonetic variations and translations of it. He had, as was well-known, Parkinson’s.
The perfunctory inquiry as to the state of his health, he appreciated, was intended to be rhetorical. But somehow, when he was exhibiting the self-evident symptoms of bodily malfunction, the impulse was to deal with it literally. He was no George Washington where “truth” was concerned, but it did strike him as a particularly blatant fib to reply “I’m great!” when his right arm was flapping away with the excited agitation of the Wright brothers attempting to gain altitude in one of their earlier models.
Sometimes he soldiered his way through the accepted forms only to be overcome by the temptation, at a later stage, to clear his conscience and the record; to amplify, to contextualise, to amend. But, as was painfully born upon him by time, there can be little guaranteed to undermine a carefully nurtured, collective sense of bonhomie than to have one’s host, or even another guest, accosting members of the party and stating, in sepulchral tones: “Aaaaah, you were asking about my health earlier, which I said at the time was great. Well, after careful consideration I’ve decided to come clean and …”
On other occasions he would decide honesty was the best course and answer the greeting “how are you?” with the apologetic, but usually accurate statement: “Worse, I’m afraid” (his being, of course, a degenerative disease and thus rarely the subject of improvement). This unexpected, if self-evident reply would leave the inquirer not only bereft of words, but frantically adjusting his or her expression from a look of determined jollity to one of mournful sympathy.
They would then nod sadly at each other with hangdog expressions sealed by manners, the truth and longing for a whisky into a seemingly never-ending silence of bob-bob-bobbing misery.
He wondered, at times, whether these social quandaries were not somehow or other linked to another minor embarrassment to which the Parkinson’s had made him subject.
Apart from engineering the shakes his malady had lent rigidity to his limbs and he had developed a particular difficulty in passing through doorways and passageways where he would tend to freeze. He was struck by the idea that this was rooted in a fundamental fear of a repeat of the birth experience.
Noting that the “freeze” could be overcome, by pretending he was a Manchester United striker dribbling a ball of paper through goal, he had a discourse published on the subject in the hopes of drawing the attention of the medical profession and earning references in various learned journals. Before this happy fame descended on him, unfortunately, the effectiveness of the football manoeuvre fell away, as if some mysterious, but canny opponent had neutralised the tactic.
After further experimentation he discovered he could “unfreeze” and gain passage if he first went down on one knee as if in obeisance on entering into the presence of a king, or emperor. Being a determined non-believer he refused to read any spiritual significance into this.
But he could not help but half cock an ear when he knelt, in an instinctive attempt to detect a chuckle from on high. This testified to a primitive hope of discovering the identity of whoever was responsible for building the impulses into the brain that make such fools of us all.