It’s the end of the line for toodle-pip ...and no more kisses at the bottom!

LAST week, I was briefly famous.

Or infamous, if you want to be negative about it. An email I had written to a government minister’s private secretary was printed on the front page of a national newspaper, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act.

I read the piece in the Irish Times in absolute terror. Not terror of having given evil advice or having sought payment in gold bullion in the Cayman Islands. No: this terror was of finding I’d peppered the communication with swearwords and slander. Fortunately, this one turned out to be clean and without casual libel. I thought I was home free. Until I hit the end. The way the message ended provided the bang-forehead-off-desktop moment.

There it was. Sorry, there they were, all four of them. Kisses. Lined up in a row. XXXX. A chain-link fence of clichéd affection at the end of a business email. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the fact is that I wasn’t even nearly on paper-kissing terms with the civil servant involved. I’d met him once, on a staircase, and, on that one occasion, by the time I worked out that he wasn’t who I’d thought he was, he wasn’t there at all. And I end up emailing him kisses? What was I on? But then, I’ve always had a problem with signing off. Some part of my brain goes into spasm whenever I part with someone and produces a sign- off line a few kilometres due south of appropriate. God-blessing atheists is just the beginning of the countless variants I can produce at the drop of a faux pas.

“I’ll get out of your hair,” I tell bald friends. “We’ve chewed the fat long enough,” I announce to obese pals.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” I say to acquaintances on crutches.

“Now, you mind yourself,” I advise card-carrying hypochondriacs.

Once, I even said: “Have a good one” to a man on his way to his friend’s funeral.

The only reason I’ve never, even in the grip of a brain spasm, ordered anyone to “have a nice day” is that in this country, people jealously reserve unto themselves the right to have whatever kind of day they want, without anybody else’s say-so.

Sign-offs are important, whether in person, in writing or on the phone. And you cannot have failed to notice that current sign-off, specific to mobile phones rather than landlines, where the person ending the call goes “Bye. Bye bye. Byebyebye” in a mad cross between a dribble and a stutter.

One of the episodes of Sex and the City hinged on the way an otherwise pleasant note to Samantha was signed: “Best, Richard.” Miranda’s take on this was that “best is the worst”. Competing for that position are emoticons of smiley faces with two hands at neck level, indicating big hugs, or of faces with the mouth clamped on a cigar, meaning “my lips are sealed”.

The use of emoticons gets very confusing for those faithful to the BlackBerry, which sometimes translates them into tiny boxes, leaving the owner to wonder whether they were being complimented, encouraged or insulted by whatever graphic had been intended by the sender.

A trend emerging at the moment is for people to offer a “thought for the day” at the end of their emails. Properly attributed, of course. So you get an email dealing with some urgent issue, and at the end, it veers off into a philosophical offering, like: “Do the best that you can in the place where you are. And be kind.”

That one comes from an American conservationist named Scott Nearing and has its merits, if the recipient happens to be in a reasonably open frame of mind when it arrives. If not, it will serve as yet another irritant in a day already full of them.

But even the most habitual and casual non-didactic parting words can have a disproportionate effect on the person at the receiving end. I once worked in an office where one executive, as he finished his coffee break, invariably said the same thing.

“Back to the salt mines,” he would murmur, in a mildly contented way.

Long before he retired, during coffee breaks, every other employee would get toe-curlingly, hand-clenchingly ready for the remark, and when it arrived, would find themselves silently mouthing it along with him. His nickname, predictably, was The Miner. When one member of staff warned a new recruit about the habit, the new recruit clearly, if briefly, reconsidered joining the firm. This seemed something of an over-reaction until he confided that one of the pivotal reasons he had left his previous job was the fact that his boss there finalised every meeting, encounter, phone call, text or email with “toodle-pip.”

“Toodle-effing-pip,” the new recruit said bitterly. You could tell it had taken years off his life.

Clichéd daily sign-offs are bad enough, but you don’t want to go, gently or roughly, into the dark night of death without saying some final words that make mourners think better of you. Charles II memorably apologised to those around his deathbed for him taking “an unconscionable time a-dying.” But the myth that George V popped his clogs directly after saying “bugger Bognor”, is apparently unfounded. He did say it, but apparently long before he died, in response to someone suggesting that his health would be greatly improved if he took another recuperative spell in that resort. His final deathbed utterance, however, was to say “God damn you”, to a nurse injecting him with a huge wallop of morphine which allowed the palace to issue a press release to the effect that: “The King’s life is drawing peacefully to its close.” Which in turn allowed them later to claim that George V’s final words had been the rather more uplifting, if less credible: “How is the Empire?”

TELEVISION sign-offs have always served as a key element of a programme or presenter’s brand. The George Clooney-directed film about Edward R Murrow reminded a new generation that the wartime broadcaster (“This — is London”) always finished his later current affairs broadcasts with “Good night — and good luck”. Viewers waited for it. Said it with him. Repeated it to each other. Accordingly, it was inevitable that his cordial enemy, Walter Cronkite, heir to his nightly throne, would come up with his own distinctive constant out-line: “And that’s the way it is.”

The man who succeeded Cronkite, Dan Rather, went further and fell harder. Once in the nightly anchorman’s chair, Rather took to turning to the camera at the conclusion of a programme, looking hard down the lens at the viewer, and intoning “Courage!”. Viewers didn’t know what to make of this gratuitous call to arms, but they knew they didn’t like it, and after a month of it, Rather had his parting shot removed from his armoury and had to go back to more normal farewell phrases.

Even “Courage!” isn’t as bad as quadruple kiss marks though. XXXX invites slagging forever. There’s no redeeming XXXX. It’s even worse than “best”. A permanent blot on the escutcheon.

Yours in self-induced mortification.