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Good Morning, I was seated at a table in the quiet area of the sports centre trying to read. A man was talking loudly on his mobile which he had on speaker phone. I waited for him to realise I was there but he either didn't notice or didn't care. I sat there wrestling with a desire to say something but also fearing his reaction if I did. Eventually, heart pounding in anticipation of confrontation and escalation, I asked him, as politely as I could, to turn it down. Without breaking off from his call the man got up, walked towards me, gave me a look of contempt, as though I was the one being rude, and then he left. In a world where rudeness has perhaps become accepted, even expected, behaviour how should we act or react? Is the only way to counter rudeness to be rude back? Watching the first (and thankfully last) Presidential debate a couple of weeks ago was to see how high rudeness has been promoted in society. Politeness couldn't get a word in. Rudeness trumped manners. It left you wondering if civility was a concept no longer capable of winning our approval, or votes. Rudeness is nothing new but perhaps, amplified by social media, it feels more pervasive, and reveals itself more readily. In a search to understand why this might be, the comedian Danny Wallace wrote a book - with a rude title - and found that rudeness was not unlike a neurotoxin that spread like flu (this was 2018) and that it was just as contagious. Some people even had a perception that rudeness was a route to success, not just for high office, but in the world of work generally. It also required little effort, was oddly satisfying and someone else usually ended up paying for it. The challenge is that its quieter, subtler antidotes - good manners, politeness, humility - whilst being things we say we admire, sound like hard work. They require some kind of holding back, a restraint or even sacrifice. Taking that insult. Looking like a loser. Giving up our right to be right. Not winning the argument. In a brilliant essay, the novelist Rachel Cusk describes Jesus being 'killed in an orgy of rudeness' whilst remaining, for the most part, polite, asking God to forgive his killers. The crucifixion must have seemed like a defeat for the values that Christ is said to embody. And yet, in the cosmic arm-wrestle between rudeness and its opposite, rudeness proved to be a false god. In sacrificing himself, Jesus translated word into deed and made evil visible. At the heart of good manners there has to be humility and, for me, only a humble God could absorb that kind of violence, contempt and rudeness and not hold it against us.