Grumpy Old Man

More and more I become the grumpy old man, finding fault with almost everything in my daily life. Is it just a pert of growing old - like rheumatism - or are things really getting worse? Most of us complain about political correctness, yet in spite of ridicule the plague continues. Sometimes I am not quite sure what started it.

Take the The Guardian newspaper's decision to abolish actresses. Now all stage performers, regardless of sex, are actors. Why? Do they have problems with the word actress? I can see no discrimination in having actors and actresses. Perhaps HM Queen should become King, so that we do not even hint of discrimination at the top. What about chairman? Of course, The Guardian will feel compelled to use chairperson, which sounds absurd. Then there is manhole and more specifically manhole cover. Billy Connelly refused to change to using personhole cover. "And I will continue to use manhole cover until women, generally, show a serious wish to start entering manholes to look after the nation's sewers."

Then there is the BBC and kilometres. We measure distances in this country in miles, not in kilometres. Vehicle speeds are in mph not km/hour. Yet in all kinds of documentary programmes they insist on kilometres. Of course, old farts like me mentally convert into miles and mph. But why do they do it? Is there a hidden agenda from Downing Street to get the nation's broadcaster to soften us up for swallowing the Lisbon Treaty and more EU regulations? Since we now trust nobody, anything is possible.

What about the cops. As they spend more and more of their time filling in forms and rounding up the drunks, they have little time for anything else. Except, that is for exercises. Exercises in more political correctness. Cops shopping in burkas; black cops organisations [one for white cops would be racist]; an organisation for gay and lesbian cops; and now, God help us, an organisation for transgender cops. How many of these are there — we should be told? Some years ago, there was a programme on TV late one night, which I found myself watching as I drifted into sleep. This dealt with the problems of black, teenage lesbians in South London. This sounded to me like a very limited social group to justify a programme on national television. But perhaps there are hoards of such women in South London. On the whole, I doubt it.

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