As I walked down to the station in the rain yesterday morning, a young woman came towards me on the pavement, clutching an umbrella in one hand while staring at the smartphone she held in the other.
Since she wasn’t looking where she was going, she bashed her umbrella into mine, almost knocking it out of my hand. I blurted out the one word that springs most naturally to the lips of so many of us in circumstances such as these.
‘Sorry!’ I said.
Having secured my apology for her carelessness, she gave me a filthy look and walked on.
Ah, well, a bloke gets used to this sort of treatment after a lifetime spent apologising for sins he hasn’t committed. Tread on my foot in the Tube? ‘Sorry,’ I’ll say, as I wince in agony. Elbow me aside in the bus queue? ‘Sorry,’ again.
Look at Tony Blair, who was happy to apologise for Britain’s failure to relieve the Irish potato famine, 150 years after the event
When a young woman accidentally clobbered me with her umbrella while she…