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Is Punctuality Selfish?

A societal view from Southern Europe that questions who is being ‘inconsiderate of others’ in disagreements over lateness

Matthew Clapham
A-Culturated
Published in
6 min readNov 11, 2024

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A stained glass window of the White Rabbit and the Dodo, commemorating Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland. The White Rabbit is, as ever, anxiously checking his pocket watch.
The White Rabbit and the Dodo have very different notions of time (Photo credit: Alice in Wonderland stained glass window, white rabbit, All Saints Church Daresbury by Matt Harrop, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

There can be little argument that different cultures have differing attitudes towards punctuality. Nor that Southern Europe — where I have lived for over twenty years — is seen as being towards the lax end of the scale when it comes to timekeeping.

One of the few Spanish phrases that monoglot Brits are likely to know — beyond ‘sangría’, ‘fiesta’ and ‘dos San Miguel, por favor’ — is ‘mañana, mañana’, taken to sum up in two words an entire nation’s lackadaisical approach to turning up and getting the job done, or even socialising.

Sticklers for punctuality will often complain that someone showing up late to an arranged appointment is ‘inconsiderate’, or ‘selfish’. By not arriving to schedule, they have forced the other person or a whole group to waste the precious resource of time. And even after two decades in Spain, settling happily into almost every aspect of life here, this uptight Brit still instinctively feels his hackles rising when someone is late.

Should I, though?

Let’s imagine a scenario of undeniable plausibility (on account of how it actually happened to…

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A-Culturated
A-Culturated

Published in A-Culturated

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Matthew Clapham
Matthew Clapham

Written by Matthew Clapham

Professional translator by day. Writer of silly and serious stuff by night. Also by day, when I get fed up of tedious translations. Founder of Iberospherical.

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