In this modern age, opening doors, picking up pocket handkerchiefs and kissing ladies hands are best left to the octogenarians and those with a fetish for role playing games. We are led to believe that we girls should be glad that chivalry is dead. No longer are women to be offered the seat, believed not to understand money and therefore never to pay or suggest double dutch.

So after a night out squired by two modern men in the Edinburgh’s snooty and expensive West End you’d expect to come home with your wallet and your feet smarting.

(For non Edinburghers, the West End is not for the shark-finned cubric zirconia wearing boys of George Street but their fathers supporting their investment on their date’s chest. And their confidence shattering dates are 10 years younger than me. )

Luckily, Sunday nights find the Armani suits tucked up in bed after a long day on the golf course which leaves the plush red banquets of the newly refurbished and boutiquified Rutland Hotel to our lesser behinds. So there was no fighting with a 200 pound ruddy nosed hedgefunder (living on his credit card these days) for a seat to rest my new 4 inch heals.

I’d been having a crafty cigarette when my drink was ordered by the boy’s dad – fyi – no grey, younger than my dad, nice watch, great shoes, good catch, recently separated (sorry boy!) so the weight of the wine list prices was no matter to me just yet as it was my round next. But I waited and waited and my round didn’t come. So I got out my purse and proceeded to climb down off my banquet but as I wobbled on my vertiginous heals I was stayed by a strict, but gentle, “I don’t like women to pay”.

I didn’t argue, but I did chew my lip as I tried to think how I could berate this man for his outdated chivalrous ways. But the words didn’t come and I meekly accepted another glass of sauvignon blanc and vowed id slip the money to the boy to pay next**. I couldn’t be seen not to be paying my way.

But as the drinks flowed and the stories of gentlemanly dating in his youth poured out, I saw the the symmetry between my boy and his dad. I saw where the boy who gets out of bed to feed my cat at 6am, who fetches me a hot water bottle, who always makes his mum a cup of tea, who walks first, who has manners, had come from and I began to regret our feminist ways.

Chivalry may inspire a fear for the return of the dark ages, that it is sexist and deserves our contempt. But by telling men that such behaviour is not acceptable could we actually lose a lot more than we think?

Kx

*This should be entitled “should chivalry be dead?” but I like how our most tactful of monarchs HRH Prince Phillip puts it.
**I did pay for the taxi home though; he was too drunk by this point to notice.