There have been moments, as the nightmare in Kosovo worsened, when being a grandparent hasn't seemed quite the unqualified joy it usually is.

I half wish, when I see heartbreaking pictures like this of a little7 boy being comforted by another as he flees Serb aggression, that I didn't have a stake in another generation - another life to worry about, to wonder what will become of him when we're long gone.

Grandparents don't just fret for their children. They fret for their children's children too.

It's such a crazy world that you lie awake at night wondering how on earth they'll cope with it, how they'll manage to survive in it, let alone thrive.

Yet there's no point in worrying, is there, because there'll be nothing at all that you can do about it. You will have done your bit. The rest is up to them.

It occurred to me the other day, in one of those rare moments of self-awareness, that at the age of 55 I've finally found a wisdom of sorts. After a lifetime of wondering what it's all about, I now think I know. And it's all thanks to my grandson Sam.

After 14 months on this earth he now walks with confidence. He's starting to use more words all the time. He piles up his bricks four high and then chortles with glee when he adds another and they don't fall over. He looks at pictures in books and goes "Mooooo" when he comes to the page with the cow on it.

He gives you wonderful hugs. And he also throws terrible tantrums at the slightest provocation - which fazes you at first until you realise that most of us throw tantrums when we don't get our own way, only as adults we do it rather more subtly than lying on our backs, screaming, kicking out and hurling our dummy across the room. We do it with petulant outbursts and sulks.

I watch him being chased along the hall, giggling as he goes, while my wife, a woman who was born to be a grandma, follows him at a sort of crouching scamper, making chasing-type noises.

And then I realise that despite all the worries about his future, despite the fretting during the dark hours, there is no way that I wish he had never come into our lives.

I have learned a lot from Sam - insights that were hidden from me when our children were young and I was so busy trying to make a mark on the world. Ambition, the obsession that you must do something important with your allotted span, causes you to fail to see the obvious.

And the obvious is this. Our purpose, the meaning of our lives, is to raise the next generation to be capable of coping with whatever their life might throw at them and, hopefully, be happy. And if we're given enough time, to help that generation to raise the next generation. There is nothing more important than a smile on the face of a child. The biggest tragedy of the world is that there are so many children in it with so little to smile about.

I Don't Believe It!

That's disgusting!, a middle-aged woman said to me the other day, shuddering, as we stood in a bus queue in the middle of Bradford. What had upset her was a spitting youth.

He was standing there in the queue, with the sort of sullen, yonderly look on his face that a lot of teenagers have. Every so often he snooked, cleared his throat, then shot a blob of spit in the direction of the road.

He didn't seem to realise that he was doing it. He was just standing there, lost in his thoughts. It must have been some sort of horrible habit that teenagers get, like blinking, or pulling strange faces. His parents must despair of him.

This woman and I then got on to the subject of spitting in general. I didn't let on that she was talking to the one and only Hector Mildew. I just made a mental note of what she had to say.

And what she said was that she was sick of people spitting.

"It goes on all over the place," she said. "You're just walking past someone, and they spit. Even though you know they didn't spit in your direction, you still feel as if you have to check your clothes. It makes me sick. No wonder there's disease. It's all over the pavements. I even saw my paper boy spitting as he walked down my path the other day."

She's right, you know. Since she mentioned it, I've been keeping my eyes open. There is far too much expectorating goes on (that's what they used to call it in the olden days, when they were a lot more polite than we are today and sweat was perspiration).

It's like the chewing-gum blobs on the pavements. Once you've realised it's there, you see it everywhere.

We're heading back for the grim days when they used to have spitoons in pubs and signs on the buses that said "SPITTING PROHIBITED" (which had usually been defaced to turn it into something vulgar).

How can we stop it? If we can't prevent people from throwing their litter down on the pavement in a city centre full of litter bins, how can we stop them expectorating? It's unhealthy and it's very bad manners, and it makes me so mad I could spit!

If you have a gripe about anything, drop a line to me, Hector Mildew, c/o Newsroom, T&A, Hall Ings, Bradford BD1 1JR, email me or leave any messages for me with Mike Priestley on (44) 0 1274 729511.

Yours Expectantly,

Hector Mildew

Enjoy Mike Priestley's Yorkshire Walks

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.