Staggering uncouthness

posted on June 30th, 2011, 10:38 am

Heidi Withers is engaged to Freddie Bourne, his mother is Carolyn Bourne, the couple recently visited the Bourne family home in Devon and it appears Heidi didn't impress her future mother in law.

So she (the mother) sent an email containing the following bits (might not be in order)

It is high time someone explained to you about good manners. Yours are obvious by their absence and I feel sorry for you.

Your behaviour on your visit to Devon during April was staggering in its uncouthness and lack of grace.

If you want to be accepted by the wider Bourne family I suggest you take some guidance from experts with utmost haste. There are plenty of finishing schools around. You would be an ideal candidate for the Ladette to Lady television series. Please, for your own good, for Freddie’s sake and for your future involvement with the Bourne family, do something as soon as possible.

Unfortunately for Freddie, he has fallen in love with you and Freddie being Freddie, I gather it is not easy to reason with him or yet encourage him to consider how he might be able to help you.

It may just be possible to get through to you though. I do hope so. Your behaviour on your visit to Devon during April was staggering in its uncouthness and lack of grace. Unfortunately, this was not the first example of bad manners I have experienced from you.

Here are a few examples of your lack of manners:
When you are a guest in another's house, you do not declare what you will and will not eat - unless you are positively allergic to something.
You do not remark that you do not have enough food.

You do not start before everyone else.
You do not take additional helpings without being invited to by your host.

When a guest in another's house, you do not lie in bed until late morning in households that rise early - you fall in line with house norms.

You should never ever insult the family you are about to join at any time and most definitely not in public. I gather you passed this off as a joke but the reaction in the pub was one of shock, not laughter.

You regularly draw attention to yourself. Perhaps you should ask yourself why. No one gets married in a castle unless they own it. It is brash, celebrity style behaviour.

I understand your parents are unable to contribute very much towards the cost of your wedding. (There is nothing wrong with that except that convention is such that one might presume they would have saved over the years for their daughters' marriages.)

If this is the case, it would be most ladylike and gracious to lower your sights and have a modest wedding as befits both your incomes.

One could be accused of thinking that Heidi Withers must be patting herself on the back for having caught a most eligible young man. I pity Freddie.

for all her desire to sound posh she doesn't even has proper grammar.

she sounds like a complete wannabe posh [beep] to me.

although i agree with her on a small number of points, you dont get to choose what food the host serves (even with family on the first visit, on later visits it depends on how you get on with family) unless you have allergies. and you dont start before others, and you dont take more unless offered. and you dont complain there isnt enough food. those were rude (maybe even uncouth ) for the first visit to these people. they werent bad enough to justify such an email though.

the rest i think is rubbish though, you dont demand people wake up when you do, and if you're in a pub then expect banter, because pubs (in britain at least) have their own etiquette, their own set of rules, and jokes/laughter/light hearted insults is definitely a part of that. it's not like they were at a country club or somewhere fancy.

anyone have a different opinion?

posted on June 30th, 2011, 11:11 am

Manners and grammar are completely separate entities; you can't really hold that against the mother. That's nothing to do with the topic of what she wrote, nor what happened at this visit to Devon.

I don't find the mother's points "posh" at all. I'm not posh myself, but I agree with it all.

Judging by what the mother wrote about whatever happened in the pub, it's obvious Heidi did say something that everyone found offensive. Banter is one thing, offence is another.

As for getting up when the family does... It is good manners to do so, yes. It's not something you can demand, but it's pretty bad manners to stay in bed really late if everyone else has got up. It's someone's house, not a hotel, so yes, you should follow what the host family does.

All the stuff about dinner, yes, it sounds like she did make quite a few bad moves there.

And as for the wedding plans... it seems she's asking for a lot more than what's practical. Sure, a lot of women have in their minds the idea of a perfect wedding, with everything they want, but it's important to have some perspective as to what's realistic, especially if your family isn't going to contribute much toward it.

And throughout what has been said, it sounds like Heidi is the type of person who demands all the time, does what she wants, and to be honest sounds more than a little spoiled.

posted on June 30th, 2011, 11:24 am

Manners and grammar are completely separate entities; you can't really hold that against the mother. That's nothing to do with the topic of what she wrote, nor what happened at this visit to Devon.

they are separate, but i can hold it against her. she decided to use all fancy long words (in an email no less) to make herself sound really smart, but she obviously isnt that smart. she should put the thesaurus away and be honest in her words.

nobody has the right to take serious offence from anything that happens in a pub, its a place for drinking and having a laugh. if she wasnt prepared to accept pub banter she should have gone somewhere else. pub's have their own rules, and there arent many of them.

talking about the wedding plans is hard to do as we have so little to go on, so i ignored them. either party could be in the wrong on that subject, no way to know.

even if this girl is in the wrong (she may very well be a nasty person too) this mother spewed some pretty nasty bile in that email. she cries that the girl is rude, when her email is full of rudeness (even uncouthness ) as well. if this marriage does happen christmas is gonna be fun for this family

[Atlantis]

posted on June 30th, 2011, 1:37 pm

Last edited by Atlantis on June 30th, 2011, 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

nobody has the right to take serious offence from anything that happens in a pub, its a place for drinking and having a laugh. if she wasnt prepared to accept pub banter she should have gone somewhere else. pub's have their own rules, and there arent many of them.

But WAS it pub banter? Or did she just speak without thinking (as we all do from time to time), say something actually insulting, then backpedal and say "It was a joke."? We don't know what she said, so it's hard to call that one.

Not everyone in pubs acts like yobs. Not all pubs have the "rough and ready" atmosphere you seem to suggest. A lot of village pubs have quite a friendly environment, where everyone knows each other and all have a laugh (about good-humoured things, showing respect to each other). It sounds old-fashioned, but it's not old-fashioned because it still happens. If a local and respected family comes in and someone is slagging them off in front of everyone, yes people will be offended, or at the very least embarrassed. I know we live in a time when the media and everyone are constantly slagging off the popular and respected people, but that doesn't mean it's not bad manners.

[EDIT: Then again, it's entirely possible she's exaggerating the whole situation. The girl may have said something quite innocuous, but the mother-in-law didn't like it. It's a small thing but it added to the bad-manner-ness of the rest of her visit, so it snowballed up to how it was portrayed in the email.

My point being, as I said before, we don't know what happened, so we can't judge. But in general, no, don't slag off your host family in public, even if you think it's fun. Everyone has different perspectives as to what's funny and what's rude. She crossed the mother-in-laws line.]

Of course, the mother-in-law did go way over the line with sending the email and all that, yes. I would be mortified if my mum sent my fiancee an email like that. And my fiencee DOES show bad manners. I'm only agreeing with the content of the email, not the right-ness of sending it.

posted on June 30th, 2011, 1:52 pm

short of a pint glass to the face there's very little you can expect in pubs

if someone insults you, insult them back 

in every pub you cant expect people to limit what they say, especially since pubs are a place for getting drunk.

if she wanted polite conversation about polo then a pub isnt the right place.

but yes it is possible she stood up and gave a long winded tirade about how the host is an idiot or something, barely possible.

posted on June 30th, 2011, 5:23 pm

The moral of the story is, be nice in writing.  We'll never know just how bad Heidi was during the visit because it wasn't recorded, but now everyone will know that the mother was mean with her email message.  Whether it's warranted or not, she could have handled it better and now the world is going to see exactly what she said while Heidi's actions will remain in doubt.

That being said, just about everything she mentioned is a viable complaint.  If you're looking to marry someone whose family is MUCH richer than your own, you should be aware of the tension and work to soothe it, even if that means staying quiet when you think you're being persecuted.  The bad manners at dinner, the sleeping in late and the insult at the pub are all Heidi's fault.  Insulting your future-mother-in-law is just RETARDED, free environment or not.

It's too bad the mother didn't know how to handle it, and came off rude when she really was right about the situation.  If she'd said it politely, she wouldn't have lost the high moral ground so badly.