The Curmudgeon

They used to get right up my nose but now that they have gone - probably to the great Readers' Letters Column in the Sky - I miss them terribly.

Now I am not knocking the good burghers who write letters to this worthy organ (although they have excoriated me on no few occasions) because when local people raise their concerns in print, they are as often as not of direct importance to other locals

No, I am writing about the old fogeys who used to write to posh nationals like The Times and the Daily Telegraph calling down the wrath of God on any new and liberal sounding development.

When I was nobbut a lad, they railed against co-educational schools, popular music on the radio, chewing gum in the street or - believe it not - mixed bathing in public swimming pools. When the Sixties came and short skirts became little more than belts, they went into apoplexy.

Now, of course, all schools (except the most highly successful) are mixed; with a couple of notable exceptions, there is nowt else but popular music on the radio; the streets now are chewing gum, their surfaces plastered with the stuff. And there is very little mixed bathing because all the kids are in the pub getting smashed on alcopops.

Disgusted and Horrified got nowhere. Society danced its dizzy way towards perdition, as they would no doubt consider today's society, and their pens ran dry.

Trouble is, they left behind a vacuum which has now been filled by the PC and their PCs. One of the saddest debating points in Beggarsdale during the foot and mouth crisis has been the huge number of politically correct townies who have jumped on to their keyboards to e-mail radio, television and newspapers in total condemnation of the "greed" of farmers and other country business folk.

Many pointed out that the miners, steel workers, shipbuilders etc never got recompensed by the government when they lost their livelihoods. Apart from the fact that is not true - many received huge redundancy payments - it also misses the very heart of the argument.

You see, no one wanted to buy British coal, steel, ships etc. They could be bought cheaper, or better, elsewhere. But don't these people still need to eat?

High Minded of Hampstead will, of course, be part of the veggie-burger brigade and we don't grow many lentils in Yorkshire. The others believe that meat comes from plastic wrappers courtesy of Messrs Tesco and Morrison.

Worst of all, they accuse the farmers of ruining the countryside, quite overlooking the fact that the farmers created the countryside as we know it in the first place. Without them, these Dales of ours would be a wilderness of scrub, bracken and bog.

Let's hope that High Minded will have as much success as Disgusted and Horrified. They clearly have no idea what they are talking about, like their predecessors, but there is one difference: I shall not miss them when they're gone.

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.