I was sitting in the bar of one of the many new hotels in Dublin recently when a young lady to my left, who was shouting, drew my attention. She wasn't shouting at a friend who was hard of hearing, but into her mobile phone. The language she was using - well, it wasn't what she was taught at the good convent school she'd probably attended.
I took a minute to study herself and her companions. There were four of them, three young ladies and a young man - in their early twenties, I'd say. They were fashionably dressed and spoke with middle-class Dublin accents, with that touch of mid-Atlantic that seems to be everywhere nowadays, thanks to the influence of American television and cinema.
They had just had a meal, and the empty wine bottle was still in the ice bucket. (One always leaves it on the table when it is finished, my dear.) The decibel level of their conversation, whether to each other or into their mobile phones, was high, as already remarked.
Lying on floor
My friends arrived and we ordered drinks (at grossly inflated prices; the £3 pint is no longer a fiction). We had been chatting for a while when suddenly I became aware of a mute object lying near my chair. The young man of the foursome nearby had fallen off his seat and was lying sprawled on the floor. Fortunately, he was at the advanced stage of inebriation when falls do not seem to do any harm.
His female companions were unaware of his departure. They were too busy shouting at each other, or bawling into their mobile phones. Although the young man looked so peaceful that I thought it a shame to disturb him, he was a bit of an inconvenience stretched out beside my chair, so I thought I'd better draw the attention of his erstwhile companions.
Not an easy task, I'm afraid, but I eventually succeeded. When I pointed to the semi-comatose figure lying near me, they did not seem in the least surprised, not to mention upset.
For a while I thought they were going to leave the recumbent one to sleep, and continue their cacophonous "conversation". However, one of them had just began to move in his direction when a member of the bar staff arrived on the scene. Together they restored the fallen to his seat. As this was a low stool, it wasn't such a good idea because, within seconds, he had fallen off again. After repeating the futile exercise a few times, the young women propped their burden against the wall, while they gathered their things together.
Behaving boorishly
To be honest, their behaviour disappointed me a little. Now, before female readers accuse me of allowing one set of standards for men, while expecting a different and higher set for women, let me make myself absolutely clear. If girls just want to have fun, why shouldn't they? If they want to behave boorishly, they are certainly no more objectionable than men are - usually a lot less so, in fact.
But somehow it was a different type of behaviour from their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago. How? Well, for one thing, the mobile phones are new. (How did we survive before their advent? We we have taken to them like a duck to orange sauce.) I think the shouting is also new. I know we live in a noisy society, which seems to have some sort of pathological fear of a little silence now and then. But even when the noise is absent (thank goodness there was no piped music or blaring television in the hotel bar I have been talking about), these young women still seemed to feel the need to yell at each other, and at their phones.
Bad language
The bad language is certainly new. When I was the age of the young women in question, bad language was almost exclusively the preserve of us men. If it is used in anger, there may be some excuse for it, but the widespread, gratuitous use of bad language nowadays is indefensible.
Finally, complete indifference to the feelings and comforts of those around them was not a characteristic that young women displayed when I was in my twenties. There was a greater sense of refinement and decorum about them and, really, a sense of courtesy and decorum becomes us all.
Please do not misunderstand me. I'm not saying that today's young men do not display the faults that I've been laying at their door of their female counterparts, because they certainly do. I'm just saying that 20 or 30 years ago, I don't think that these unpleasant forms of behaviour were as much in evidence among young women.
What a pity we men have dragged them down to our level.