Sara Cox sits in

Sarah Joseph, editor of a Muslim Lifestyle magazine

There is one thing that I’m still a stickler for, and as I get older, find myself even more cranky about. I CANNOT abide BAD manners. That rude person who barges past you, that person who tuts snarlingly at you on the tube because you hit her shoulder even though you apologised, and the person who sucks their teeth at you when you are the cause of a minor misdemeanour like entering the lift a second late. I cannot abide these things, and now I am here--in middle age--I tell people that. My husband worries that one day, said rude person is going to do more than suck their teeth at me, but may actually attempt to remove mine, nevertheless....

But manners for me are more than just avoiding bad ones, it is also about promoting good ones – like not being on your phone when paying at the checkout till or at the dinner table, about holding a door open for someone, and even offering to carry a pram up a flight of stairs for a mother who is struggling up said stair case.

It is also – and wait for this one – about understanding the norms of the country you live in – including their religion.

Now I’m a Muslim, but perhaps because I used to be a Christian, or perhaps because I studied Religion at university, or maybe just because I care enough, I know that the “good” in Good Friday doesn’t mean great, happy, wonderful, but rather it’s a day of mourning representing the death of Jesus Christ. Which is why I feel a supermarket advert suggesting that their beer was going to make Good Friday “a whole lot better”, is rather inappropriate, although they later apologised. It’s also why I am with my Christian friends when they get offended by the fact that chocolate eggs—representing the renewal that Easter Sunday brings—are being sold for Easter with the word “Easter” removed. 

People of all faiths and none may all be sharing this Bank Holiday, but it is surely important to at least recognise and appreciate the origins of the holiday that we all partake of. We may not be religious ourselves, we may belong to a different religion entirely, but understanding another’s faith and recognising that it is important to them, seems good manners to me; and for me, the commercialisation of someone’s deeply held beliefs doesn’t.