May I wish a long and happy retirement to Mrs Joyce Swift, aged 64, and her friend Mrs Annie Jepson - who at 48 only just makes it into the Who's Counting? category.

What have they done to deserve being singled out, these two women who by all accounts are in the same weight class as TV's Two Fat Ladies? They've sorted out some of the mean streets of Rotherham, that's what they've done. Thanks to their patrols over the past four years, yobbism has been in retreat and many of the louts who were making life a misery have seen the error of their ways and settled down.

Glue sniffers and other youngsters were running wild on the Meadowbank estate when Mrs Swift and Mrs Jepson decided that enough was enough. They began to patrol, looking for people who were making a nuisance of themselves and challenging them.

"We never started anything but we always finished it," said 171/2-stone Mrs Swift, who demonstrated her ability for finishing things early on in their campaign when a teenager squared up to her and came off second best after a single blow from the battling grandmother.

Now the pair feel that their work is done and are retiring - having shown the youngsters that grannies are not to be messed with.

What they've done isn't a recommended course of action for everyone, of course. It helps a lot if you're big and hard. But I find it a very cheering example of older people reasserting themselves and their values on a lawless young generation, and winning their respect by standing firm against them.

Perhaps there's a lesson there for society as a whole, which seems to spend far too much time appeasing those who behave badly instead of slapping them down.

It's ironic that the launch of the Debate of the Age, a national talking shop about how Britain needs to adapt to cope with a growing elderly population, should coincide with news that the Halifax bank would prefer people aged over 35 not to open a current account with it, thank you very much.

Such ageism! And at a time when we're supposed to be focusing on how to do away with it. The reason, I gather, is that current accounts aren't much of an earner for banks but they're tolerated because the people who have them are likely also to use other financial services which yield a higher profit.

The over-35s are more likely to already have their finances organised and therefore be less likely to need those services. Consequently, the Halifax doesn't want them unless they can guarantee feeding at least £500 a month into their account.

Business is business, I know, and the Halifax has a duty to its shareholders - of which I'm one until I offload my windfall shares and sever my connection with the company, which will be as soon as possible.

The Halifax won't care about that, of course. The sooner flotation shares pass from the accounts of the little people to the larger shareholders the better, I gather, as far as most companies are concerned.

But it's the only way I know of expressing my disapproval of a policy which points the way to the future possible exclusion of a section of the community from some banking services purely on the grounds of age.

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