I grew up – using that term loosely – without a telephone and my parents didn’t own a car; in my youngest years we had no TV and horses used to deliver the milk in the morning. Post World War 2 rationing was still in force, the iron railings outside my house had been taken to make guns during the war and, at age 4, I walked to school on my own without my parents having to worry about my being kidnapped.

My mother read books to me and soon I was reading them for myself; the first time I saw the seaside – Penarth in Wales – was riding with my father on a child’s bicycle seat fixed to the crossbar; helmets hadn’t been invented.

Johnny Onion men would sell onions door to door, there was no supermarket, no central heating and no complaining. My entertainment consisted of playing with the little curly haired girl, Anne, from across the street: we would play “alleys” – rolling marbles in the gutter and, on hot days dig up road tar with lollipop sticks.

My mother smoked in the same room as me, we had a tin bath that had to be filled from kettles boiled on an iron range that was heated by coal, no vacuum cleaner, no inside toilet and no money.

We did have a wireless and I can still remember – before school intruded – sitting down with my mother around 2:00 p.m. every afternoon to listen to “Listen with Mother”. Later, when I read to my children I usually began with, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

I don’t remember any children being hyper-active, suffering from attention deficiencies nor their parents being depressed, mentally unstable or malcontent. My grandfather, who lived with us, won my affection by being a soft touch for threepenny bits which could be used for ice-cream. He had worked in a brewery and – as my mother told me later – became a little too fond of the fruit of his labour. To my mother’s horror, he used to urinate in the kitchen sink, presumably after over-imbibing.

A rude interruption of these halcyon days came when I started Seven Road Junior School. One of my first teachers was Mr. Stucky who, on the first day, introduced thirty nervous four and five year olds to the oak case hanging on the schoolroom wall: it contained an array of canes, each with its own name. Bad behaviour in class was never a problem. It was in that year, as I recall, that my affections for the curly-haired Anne waned and I fell head-over-heels for brown-eyed Helen. Over the years, this became a recurring pattern.

A couple of years later we were handed a mug and given a half day off school to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

In the summer we used to catch a bus into the country to pick wild blackberries; later, these would magically be turned into blackberry and apple pie by my mother. An incomparable delicacy.

And now we have this:

Parents who want to stop their children from picking up and playing with their gadgets can now buy a child-friendly alternative for £19.99.

Dubbed the ‘BlackBerry for babies’ the ‘Text and Learn’ device from LeapFrog looks like an over-sized PDA and is designed for children as young as three-years-old.

The gadget helps youngsters learn how to ‘browse’ and ‘text’ without going online, allaying parental fears of their children being contacted by strangers or cyber-bullies.

I am profoundly grateful to have grown up when I did.

The “f” word was first used live on BBC television on November 13^th 1965 by Kenneth Tynan, l’enfant terrible, sadomasochist, alcoholic and misogynist who made a living writing bad play reviews and saying jolting things in the 60s. After his débuting of the forbidden word, there was shocked outrage throughout Britain – except, of course, at the BBC who heralded it as a breakthrough in free expression.

At the fateful moment, the cameraman tactfully panned to the table and zoomed in on Tynan’s drink, attempting to imply that it was the whiskey talking. In spite of this valiant effort, the BBC was compelled to issue a public apology; they didn’t mean it.

Even though it seemed likely that no word in the English language could cause any amount of consternation at the BBC now – the “f” word is de rigueur in every drama and no-one cares – Carol Thatcher has found a way to shock even the BBC:

Carol Thatcher banned from BBC’s The One Show for ‘golliwog’ comment.

A BBC source said: “There were a number of complaints from people in the room about this particular remark, it did cause offence. A number of people were quite taken aback by the language.”

Thatcher, a journalist and writer, made a name for herself by winning the ITV reality programme I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2005.

Her spokesman told The Times that her client never intended to cause any offence and it was “meant as a joke”.

“She made a light aside about this tennis player and his similarity to the golliwog on the jampot when she was growing up,” he said.

I had a golliwog doll when I was growing up: I was quite fond of it. Golliwogs were, until 1983, emblazoned on Robertson’s jam jars. I can’t help wondering whether the fact that the perpetrator of the “g” word was Margaret Thatcher’s daughter had anything to do with the the howls of outrage.

One thing I do know: if I am ever interviewed by the BBC, I am going to say “golliwog”.

When I had to take RE (Religious Education) in school, it was a welcome opportunity for a half-hour nap. Now, politicians are threatening to take all that way: the new RE courses will be so profoundly annoying that lethargic students will be too irritated to sleep. Where has the compassion gone in the British school system?

From the Telegraph:

Instead of concentrating on the Bible and the holy books and tenets of other major religions, a significant part of the course is tied to citizenship and personal, social and health education.

Academics claim, however, that the syllabus, to be taught from September, had turned a serious subject in to a “pat qualification for political correctness”.

One of the topics covered is religion and relationships, which will teach pupils about homosexuality, religious attitudes to contraception and the concept and role of parenting.

Another topic is “religion, sport and leisure”. Pupils will study “religious attitudes towards the purpose use and importance of leisure; types and purposes of relaxation, e.g stress relief and the misuse of leisure time, e.g binge drinking.”

In a sample exam paper pupils are asked, under the heading of religion and planet earth, “what is conservation?” and “is recycling good stewardship”. Teenager must also give two reasons why many religious believers are against deforestation.

A second paper asks candidates to name two illegal drugs, give three reasons why some people take illegal drugs and to explain the attitudes of religious believers to smoking tobacco.

“I think it comes from the desire of politicians to stamp their influence on everything. It looks as if they are turning RE in to a pat qualification for political correctness.

Religious studies is a popular GCSE. Year on year increases have seen the number of entries rise to more than 171,000, up from 147,000 in 2006.

The evidence for the soporific effect of RE is in that last sentence above. Alas, no more: the gentle rhythm of snoring to the Psalms is to be replaced with the grating dissonance of contraception and deforestation. How are students to recover from all the binge drinking?

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel has this to say:

So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over.

And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it.

Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a high jacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

The recent temperatures and global cooling over the last few years are no deterrent to Al Gore and his luddite-hobbit acolytes in their relentless pursuit of reintroducing the stone-age to Western Civilisation.

From Theodore Dalrymple

I was awakened at one in the morning in my small and elegant hotel on the Herengracht, the resort of literary types, by that most terrible of sounds — raised English voices.

A group of standard English drunken thugs in their thirties had entered the hotel with their prostitutes in tow and were refusing to leave. They were conducting two arguments at once: one with the police, who had arrived to eject them, and one with the prostitutes over how much they should be paid (the prostitutes were demanding E300, and they were offering E100). Somehow the police involved themselves in this latter argument too; a policewoman appealed to them to find ‘middle ground’, i.e. (I suppose) E200.

I hesitate to sound like one of those Protestant divines who saw in outbreaks of the plague God’s justified vengeance on a sinful people, but as I looked into the crude red faces of those men in their bully-boy Saturday-night uniform of short-sleeved shirts not tucked into their trousers, exuding lager fumes and arrogant in their inalienable right to make a nuisance of themselves, I could not help but think that no other nation has ever more deserved a prolonged period of economic hardship and utter misery. The slump is indeed God’s wholly accurate and justified judgment upon the English.

God also visits judgement by allowing people to have what they think they want: Romans 1. A modern example is Barack Obama.