ONCE, waiting to cash a cheque in an Italian bank, I was attacked by a man on a crutch.

Let me set the scene. When one enters a bank in Northern Ireland, one usually joins a long, orderly queue.

Civilised and slow-moving, the queue is usually made up of remarkably patient customers who resignedly accept modern bank policy of never having more than two tellers at the tills at one time, so to speak.

This is because, ideally, the bank wants all of us to lodge and withdraw online and doesn’t really want to see us about the place at all, if I may quote the good Lord Brookeborough, or maybe it was Sir Basil Brooke.

Anyway, people make banks look untidy. Let the clients stay at home and send their money in electronically. This is the way all modern banking will be conducted in the future. It’s inevitable.

Similarly, Italian banks want Italians to bank online, too, but Italians are genetically incapable of staying at home.

So it is that Italian banks are not like Northern Ireland banks. Instead of the previously mentioned orderly queue, Italian banks play host to a lunging, seething rabble.

People push past and edge brutally in front of you. The respectable distance normally maintained between the front of the queue and the customer who’s actually transacting business at the counter does not exist in Italy.

The mob behind is craning over your shoulder, panting down the back of your neck and vigorously thrusting forward as one.

This was the situation I found myself in two years ago in a Roman bank which was within dwarf-hurling distance of the Vatican itself, in some eyes the centre of all fair play.

By dint of pure brute force, I had reached the front of the queue. Only two or three sturdy souls stood between me and the bank teller.

As I tore viciously at the garments of those in front of me, I noticed one man gamely dragging himself along on crutches.

Feeling pangs of human decency which I thought had been left behind at the airport, I stood back and let the crippled man go first. As he hauled himself painfully towards the bank clerk, I felt a sharp, numbing pain in the small of my back.

I turned round to find an apoplectic man withdrawing a single crutch from my lower lumbar region.

When I’d finished screaming obscenities directly into his face, I realised that he had attacked me for letting the man with two crutches get ahead of me in the queue.

By judicious application of Italian logic I understood this.

Whereas the average Northern Irelander would regard a man with two crutches as being more worthy of special consideration than a man who required only the one, Italian logic decreed that the man with one crutch, who is obviously less encumbered and marginally more mobile, should have been granted precedence over the slower double?crutched man.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about people with crutches in banks.

Truth is that I feel it my duty to warn people that there remain places in this world where a man can be attacked by a man with one crutch for helping a man who requires two.

It’s a cruel world. But when in Rome, I urge you to do as the Romans do.

And did I tell you about the time in that same Eternal City when I was standing in a crowded bus and a passenger got on and dumped a heavy package onto my foot?

In Northern Ireland, I’d have diffidently said ‘sorry’ and apologetically withdrawn my foot from the sudden load. Not in Rome.

If a man finds a parcel dropped on his foot on a Holy City bus, it is incumbent on him to curse loudly and kick the package down the bus aisle with all the brute force he can muster.

Also, it makes a man feel much better?

Originally published in The Belfast Telegraph