Sorry!

Over the last ten years I’ve lived in the UK I have picked up couple of local habits with ease - being late and saying sorry. I guess the latter can be helpful with the first one. 

I still do remember my very first visit to a shop in London when I was a tourist in England. Living abroad felt foreign to me and something I couldn’t totally comprehend at the time, so basically when I was very young and naïve! So as soon as I was in there, the shop assistants approached me at speed asking if I needed any help. “For goodness sake, I JUST arrived here, not sure what you’re even selling! Oh, shoes! No, thanks! Can’t you tell I’m just wondering around in Oxford Street and doing some window shopping! Yeah, I know I should have stayed outside of the shop then, but oh well, happened to step in!” Ok, I didn’t actually say that and probably these thoughts didn’t even cross my mind. More likely I tried to think of an excuse and escape ASAP. Oh, sorry, I’m misleading you now. I don’t think I was trying to find an excuse, because being apologetic wasn’t something I was used to. To be honest I just answered with a simple ‘no’ to the querying shop assistants, who then said ‘sorry’ over and over again while I left in a hurry, gaze at the floor, cheeks burning of embarrassment.

Nowadays I’m saying sorry a lot, naturally even to the street posts I’m bumping into, AND obviously when I’m late. In Estonia it would be considered rude to be late. I guess Estonians are more similar to Germans in that sense and have adopted their punctuality. But as these last years I have lived in Britain (and not in Estonia or Germany) I’ve learnt that as long as you rely on the trains (or should I say public transport?) and not on your own feet to walk (hurriedly) the distance, and need to be somewhere on a certain time, always allow some extra time! 

When I went to volunteer at Sheffield Doc/Fest recently I allowed myself only one extra hour, but as it soon appeared it wasn’t enough. A frequent train-traveller, a psychology professor sat next to me (and was on his way to do some IQ testing) told me that I should always add minimum two hours to my journey. And this was exactly for how long my train was eventually delayed, with a bonus of changing the trains and standing last half an hour in front of the toilet, eating my home-made sandwich which I didn’t dare to eat while trying not to be too transparent about my (lack) of knowledge and intelligence level with the IQ-way-above-an-average-professor. During the standstill of the train he suggested he could test me to pass the time. I didn’t feel the need to show off in front of the carriage full of people and refused his kind offer. Later when he was leaving I apologised not being able to hold the conversation on aeroplane engines (that he had had with someone else with an IQ of 183, because that’s what you would do if you were so highly intelligent). Anyway when I finally got to my post at Doc/Fest, being late more than a standard 15 minutes, I turned on my repeat mode of saying ‘sorry’.

Time management aside I’m also trying to instil into my children to say sorry when necessary (it appears you can never run out of the possibilities for that). I have done it so much so the other night during the Euro matches one of them came to share the frustration: “It’s not really nice that footballers who hurt other players on the pitch do not say sorry to each other…”

And additionally on the same note - it all makes sense now when I think way back to the time when I was a little girl at school. One of the most important sentences that had to be learnt by heart in our English class and it’s still stuck with me, was: “Please excuse my coming late!”