If there is one good thing to come out of this godawful pandemic, please can it be an end to the practice of air kissing? You might have spent the past year longing to give your friends a bear hug, or hold your grand children, but how many of us have really missed one of the most bizarre formal greetings during social distancing? I certainly haven’t. In fact, I am desperate for building back better to involve dispensing with this stupid affectation.
The beauty of a handshake is there is only really one way of doing it, and therefore much less room for things to go wrong.
It’s been around in our culture since the 1950s, initially with the aim of keeping a woman’s make-up intact by avoiding any contact with her lips or face, and has spread from the fashion and film worlds to showbusiness for ugly people: politics. It is by far the worst thing about my job as a political journalist, not least because few people agree on how one should air kiss.
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