They know how to accept flattery. Old ladies, seemingly without fail, really love it when you look them in the eye and say something nice with a smile. Sometimes you get a giggle, sometimes a witty rejoinder (or at least, something that would have been witty in 1946.) Unlike these newfangled sullen youths, they acknowledge a held door or vacated seat.

I think it’s because they are pretty confident that you’re not doing it because you want to schtupp them.

They also know how to dance! Properly, I mean - in couples. When I started salsa there was a woman there who must’ve been over 80. She couldn’t do all the movements and you had to watch out not to move her arms into certain positions from which, you felt, they may never return; but dancing with her was like dancing with a cloud!

It occurs to me that what they have is simply manners.

Hearing on the radio about Post Office closures, you can see why earlier generations have manners and the more recent ones don’t so much. In the old days you couldn’t get groceries without dealing with a person. You couldn’t get road tax or books online. You couldn’t email, you had to go and buy a stamp. From a person. Bread from the baker, meat from the butcher. In other words, people needed to get along with other people, in order just to get along.

Now, people live by remote control, through a computer screen, plugged into the iPod.

You don’t even need to pass money to the person at the checkout any more, just follow the instructions on the screen of the PIN machine.

No wonder the poor kids these days don’t know what to do if you speak to them.

The concept of “people” has shifted now. No longer does “people” represent the individuals who supply your basic needs of food, security, communication and fun. “People” now means those agents working outside your sphere of comfort, of supply, of security. They are the people who might get the last bargain sofa before you, the suspicous male hanging out around the playground, the hackers and spammers making the internet all dangerous and inconvenient, the youths sitting around the street corner not sure what to do with their new found urges, all packing presumable knives and looking for presumable mischief; or they are distant starving peoples who provide us with ways to feel morally superior to one another.

Your homework is in two stages:

1) Come up with a standard fallback response for use in case someone says something nice about you.

2) Tell somebody something nice about themself this week.