Grooming...

In 1955, Vladimir Nabakov's novel Lolita was published in France. Graham Greene said it was one of the three best novels he'd read that year. Others thought the book was filthy pornography.

What aroused repugnance, perhaps, wasn't so much Humbert Humbert's sexual obsession with his 12-year-old step daughter Dolores Haze but her willingness to have sex with him. The idea of a young girl sexually seducing a middle-aged man proved too much for some. Unsurprisingly, the row that followed only aroused the public's curiosity. There is a reference to this in the Hancock's Half-Hour radio comedy called The Missing Page.

In 1971, Mike Hodges' movie thriller Get Carter got a mixed reception, in spite of Roy Budd's eerie soundtrack. The film is now acknowledged as a masterpiece; but at the time the idea of Michael Caine as a heartless Newcastle-born gangster, Jack Carter, didn't gell. What may have turned people's stomachs was the sub-plot. Carter returns home to find out why his brother Frank died, allegedly in a car crash. In the course of his investigations, Carter stumbles upon graphic evidence that Frank's daughter Doreen has been groomed to take part in group sex films with adults.

Men and women corrupting the vulnerable young for criminal or immoral purposes is not new. Ever since the publication in 1838 of the first part of Oliver Twist the public has associated the murkier regions of East London with the spectres of Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Nancy's Steps, on the South Bank of Southwark Bridge, I think it is, is a landmark.

But as we know from today's Times (9/5/12) the predatory grooming of young females has been rife in towns and cities from the Midlands to Glasgow.

If Charles Dickens was alive and writing today, his take on the criminal grooming of displaced youngsters might be called Olivia Twist. His teenage hero would be a teenage heroine; Fagin would be a Pakistani Muslim. The action would take place in Rochdale, Manchester, Blackburn, Leeds or Bradford. There would be no happy ending, no benevolent intervention by Mr Brownlow or Mrs Bedwin.

Two girls from children's homes in Manchester and Rochdale, according to the newspaper, died in separate incidents as a result of sexual abuse by "men of Pakistani heritage". Reportedly, over the past five years a further 629 incidents of girls being sold for sex have been recorded.

Official inquiries into this matter were crippled by "racial sensitivities". For example, in 1991, nine girls from three residential homes in Bradford were similarly used and abused by pimps. Bradford Council's subsequent inquiry, said The Times, did not reveal that the culprits were all of Pakistani origin.

Does racial origin matter? If there is something in the culture of these men, and the nine Muslim men convicted at Liverpool Crown Court, and the two Muslim men convicted at Bradford Crown Court, yesterday, that convinces them that young girls are trash, then it does matter.

We have become accustomed to two distinct forms of sexual abuse of youngsters, as The Times' report says:- White men, acting alone, are responsible for most chil sex-offences in this country yet in Heywood, as in so many of the towns and cities of northern England, a different model of exploitation has taken root over the past 20 years. Born of a collision between two cultures, it has led to the normalisation of a grotesque, collective game in which vulnerable girls are systematically targeted, groomed and then sold for sex to men who view them with contempt...

...The men offering such largesse belonged to a sub-section of British Pakistani society that does not frown upon males in their 30s and 40s pouring half a litre of vodka down the throat of a girl of 13 before lining up to have sex with them...

...The jury listened in horrified fascination as the girl explained that Pakistani men "pass you around like a ball"..."Most of them don't even know you but you meet them anyway. If I gave a taxi driver my number, give it two weeks and I'll have about ten Pakis in my phone. By the next week I'll have a phone book of Pakis."

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, is only too aware of the problems of racial sensitivities. In the same edition of the newspaper he writes:- Since January 2011, when I last wrote about street-grooming for this newspaper, there has been an increase in the number of young people speaking out against such men. Across the country I meet young British Pakistanis who abhor what has been happening and are sickened by the behaviour of these criminals, even more so because they come from our community.

They accept that British Pakistanis are over-represented in such offending and that their actions bring shame on themselves, their families and their community. Five years ago it was very different. I was threatened with violence because people thought that by speaking out I was doing the work of the Far Right. How things have changed.

The bad news is that we have a generational split. Sadly, our community leaders say that this has nothing to do with them and that they have no responsibility to tackle the issue. They think it is all a big conspiracy. I have tried to make them wake up to the threat that these criminals pose to the integrity of our community, only to be met with total silence. The difference in attitude between our younger and older generations presents a continuing challenge.

The challenge is made more difficult by political correctness. Not admitting the obvious, however unpalatable to racial sensitivities, only leads to self-deception and more trouble. Playing down criminal activity for fear of the accusation of racism or giving heart to the Far Right is the usual excuse offered for saying or doing nothing.

In 2003 I reviewed a crime novel called On Dangerous Ground written by Keighley author Lesley Horton. The genesis of her story was a Barnardo's Report in the mid-1990s which stated that there were more child prostitutes in Bradford and Keighley than anywhere else in the country. Mrs Horton, who was the head of a unit for pregnant schoolgirls, told me that Bradford's Vice Squad had told her that Bradford did not have child prostitution, otherwise they'd know about it.

Bradford in a state of denial? It wouldn't be the first time, nor the last. The 2001 Muslim Riot - 244 men were identified and convicted for arson, looting and violence, all of them Muslim men - is now known as the "disturbance", doubtless for fear of offending racial sensitivities. Revisiting history is one thing; but does re-writing it because circumstances appear to have changed do any good? Perhaps we should we no longer refer to Nazis as Germans or Northern Europeans.

Wickedness is not the preserve of the naturally wicked: it is integral to the human condition, irrespective of racial origin. However, nurture or culture may play a part in warping human nature.

In 2004, in a small theatre above a pub in Camden, a small audience saw the premiere of David Hines' play Nymphs and Shepherds, a 90-minute monologue by a character called Oliver, an unrepentant white male paedophile. Oliver's graphic reflections are particularly shocking because they are candid, unapologetic and, like Lolita, touch upon a taboo subject.

But the purpose of Hines' play is to show that men who prey upon little girls are not demons. If they were they would be easy to identify. They are human beings in the grip of a drive, a predilection, which even they may not understand. It is the volatility of their compulsion that makes them dangerous.

The danger for sociey at large is when private compulsion becomes a corporate enterprise, as in Bradford, Rochdale, Manchester and elsewhere.

Crisis of Identity, Loss of Sovereignty...

Periodically, every country goes through a crisis of identity. Demography changes, borders change, internal boundaries change, international relations change - friends become foes and foes friends.

Throughout the chronicle of recorded time countries have expanded, contracted or have, like Poland and Persia, vanished temporarilly or permanently. Historically, mainland Europe has been accustomed to the rise and fall of nations within the contours of its geography. Prague was governed by Vienna, Rome by Paris, and in World War II all four were governed by Berlin. Today, they all are governed by Brussels. Wars and revolutions are volcanoes; in the aftermath the landscape changes, maps have to be changed: Czechoslovakia becomes the Czech Republic, the USSR breaks up into its constituent republics, the United Kingdom becomes a satellite of the European Union.

In my lifetime the EU has had almost as many incarnations as Shakespeare's seven ages of man. In my youth the European Economic Community (EEC) of six nations was scarcely a blip on the horizon of my consciousness. By my thirtieth year in 1979, it had got bigger and much closer. The 1972 European Communities Act had gone through Parliament, our currency had been changed to decimal, elections for the European Parliament were taking place. In my fourty-fourth year the 1993 Maastrict Treaty was ratified and the EEC became the European Community (EC) with fifteen member states and a flag of its own - blue with a gas ring of gold stars that reminded me of Custer's Seventh Cavalry. By then I had visited Brussels and Luxembourg. In my fifty-eighth year the EC became the European Union with twenty-seven member states, seventeen of which had given up their own currency in exchange for the euro. Monetary union was the precursor of the original idea behind the entire enterprise: political union.

Throughout these six decades, an idea has pervaded the political, social and literary culture of this country, the idea of angst. Superficially, this looks like post-war Existential anxiety of the Jean Paul Sartre kind. One of the features of my frenetic youth, before I learned from Christopher Hampton's play Total Eclipse that what was aestetically plausible wasn't necessarily true, was the specious linking of disparate political and social events to cultural phenomena. Thus, Beckett's Waiting for Godot and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger embodied the crisis of national identity that resulted from the loss of empire and Suez. Though which was cause and which was effect had me stumbling over definitions of deductive and inductive reasoning. The literature of pre-revolutionary Russia is ripe with characters worrying about whether they have become "superfluous" - a nineteenth century form of angst.

Who are we, what are we, what is any of it worth, did not originate from the independence of India in 1947 or the invasion of Egypt in 1956. These universal questions have been around at least since the three temptations of Christ - at least Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor thought so (see chapter five of The Brothers Karamazov). Nevertheless, they have been projected as the Questions of Our Time during my brief lifetime. Every so often they break out, red and raw. The recent Channel 4 programme Make Bradford British aroused the irritable rash of identity, once again making perfect strangers red in the face at the thought of all pervasive foreigners, political correctness and red tape. Ambivalent as I am about most things, I felt swayed first one way, then the other, as the debate, largely manufactured by newspapers, raged on.

And then, yesterday, my friend Richard North mailed me a Foreign and Commonwealth Office paper entitled Sovereignty and the European Communities. I was startled. The thrust of what I understood from this 15-page document was that while the nation was getting knotted up over identity a huge amount of national sovereignty has been sheered away from the white cliffs of Dover, deliberately not accidentally. The identity crisis had been a distraction. What had vanished was not the national character. In spite of the creation of a Parliament for Scotland and Assemblies for Wales and Northern Ireland, the old regional rivalries were still apparent. Britain, the United Kingdom, call it what you will, was still a place of faith, hope and charity, in its support of good causes, its dislike of fatalism in response to catastrophe and something a dissident Russian poet once told me she most admired about Britain: "You are not a coward." Gullible, yes,credulous, certainly, piss-taking, abosolutely, lacking in self-confidence, of course, suspicious of seriousness, yes. In Russia, poets are expected to be prophets. In this country they are expected to be light entertainers.

Allow me to quote some extracts from this document.  Note the self-satisfied tenor of the language, which would not be out of place in a script for Yes, Prime Minister:-

We are all deeply conscious through tradition, upbringing and education of the distinctive fact of being British. Given our island position and long territorial and national integrity, the traditional relative freedom from comprehensive foreign, especially European alliances and entanglements, this national consciousness may well be stronger than that of most nations.

When 'sovereignty' is called into question in the debate about entry to the Community, people may feel that it is this 'Britishness' that is at stake. Here Mr Rippon's pointed question "are the French any less French?" for their membership (sic)...

However it is presented, entry to the Community will mean major change. It is natural and inevitable that this should be disliked and resisted by many. Even the 'loss of sovereignty' may be limited to fairly precise areas of Government and Parliamentary powers and be without significance for the lives of most of the country, still the phrase conjures up a spectre of major and uncontrollable change and of adjustments that will have to be made which are deeply disturbing...

...In entry to the Community we may seem to be opting for a system in which bureaucracy will be more remote (as well as largely foreign)...The British have long been accustomed to the belief that we play a major part in ordering the affairs of the world and that in ordering our own affairs we are beholden to none. Much of this is mere illusion. As a middle power we can proceed only by treaty, alliance and compromise. So we are dependent on others both for the effective defence of the United Kingdom and also for the commercial and international financial conditions which govern our own economy...

...Joining the Community...is a further large step away from what is thought to be unfettered national freedom and a public acknowledgement of our reduced national power; moreover, joining the Community institutionalises in a single, permanent coalition the necessary process of accommodation and alliance over large areas of policy, domestic as well as external...

...the transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential...

...The Community, if we are to benefit to the full, will develop wider powers and coordinate and manage policy over wider areas of public business...To control and supervise this process it will be necessary to strengthen the democratic organisation of the Community with consequent decline of the primacy and prestige of the national parliaments.

The task will not be to arrest this process, since to do so would be to put considerations of formal sovereignty before effctive influence and power, but to adopt institutions and policies both in the UK and in Brussels to meet and reduce the real and substantial public anxieties over national identity and alienation from government, fear of change and loss of control over their fate which are aroused by talk of 'loss of sovereignty'. 

This long-sighted paper was written in April 1971, the year before the European and Communities Act. The following was written by Dostoveysky in his aforementioned novel and published in 1879:-

Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.

Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor describes how a select group of 100,000 will run the lives of thousands of millions by taking away the anxieties that come with freedom. Ruled by Miracle, Mystery and Authority, the masses will be allowed to work and play and sin, strictly under the controlling guidance of these religious Bolsheviks.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has moved westwards. For the time being at least, for all empires fall eventually, we take our orders from a governing class of federal technocrats. The existential crisis of who we are and what we believe is, like the poor, always with us. The carving away of sovereignty, however you define it in relation to power and authority, is a twentieth century decision. The deliberate and progressive erosion of sovereignty, like gum recession, has weakened the teeth of the British bulldog. No point in seeking assurance from Churchill.
    

That Sinking Feeling

If a vast enterprise worth trillions of dollars, namely the European Union's eurozone, is capable of capsizing, why should anyone be surprised by the fate of the Costa Concordia?

This high-rise cruise ship costing a reported $300m, with all its electronic safety and fail-safe devices, was no match for a few rocks, some of which can be seen sticking through the keel.

The accident on Friday (the 13th incidentally), occurred on the day that the credit rating of la belle France and other EU members went tits up. The fate of the ship and the fate of the eurozone symbolise the propensity for hubris in overblown human enterprises. There is an obvious parallel with the unsinkable Titanic which went down on its maiden voyage.

Inadequate bulkheads and too few lifeboats made April 14, 1912, a night to forget for the P & O line. Design faults, faulty assumptions and presumptuousness made Titanic an accident waiting to happen. The mighty ship's unimaginable doom was a precursor of human error and faulty political alliances that resulted in the 9/11 implosion of the European house of cards in 1914, although I came to think of Titanic as symbolic of the fate of Ireland - broken in two in unfathomable depths (see Raising the Titanic in The Dog's Not Laughing).

However, a more apposite analogy for the fate of the Costa Concordia is the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Townsend Thorensen roll on roll off ferry which capsized just outside Zeebrugge on another Friday evening 35 years ago, killing 193 people.

Comparisons are only as odious as the glibness with which they are made, but in the spring of March 1987 what struck me most forcibly was the coincidence of the ship's name with the spirit of the times in England, when free enterprise was highly favoured by Margaret Thatcher, months away from winning her third consecutive general election.

The capsizing of the ship, due to human error rather than an act of God or nature, heralded the collapse of the spirit of free enterprise in Britain at the end of the 1980s, which was also the end of the Iron Lady. Confidence collapsed and we had to abandon the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Then, as now, recesssion rolled in like the ride at Dover beach. Then, as now, Brussels was busily building its monstrous ship of state which was to be launched at Maastricht. Now water is seeping in and the officers on the bridge are fighting among themselves. By all accounts the ship is rolling over like the Herald of Free Enterprise.
But unlike that disaster, there won't be any medals given out for selfless acts of bravery.

Turbulent Priests

Twenty-five years ago yesterday (Sunday) the body of missing Polish priest Father Popieluszko was pulled out of a canal outside Warsaw, where it had been dumped by Communist security police.

The 37-year-old priest and his demonstrable sympathy for Gdansk shipyard workers of the trades union Solidarity made him a target of the fearful Polish Communist state. Murdering him did not change the course that history was taking; if anything, it added to the current which swept away the regime within a few years of Father Popieluszko's assassination.

The part played by churches in the political events of the late 1980s among the members of the Warsaw Pact appears to have been obscured in this country by the dust kicked up over the anti-capitalism protest outside St Paul's Cathedral - admission £14.50.

The dust is likely to get thicker following today's resignation of the Dean, the Very Reverend Graeme Knowles, with the threat of bailiffs looming larger.

By and large the English prefer their priests to remain good shepherds watching over their flocks. The likes of Trevor Huddlestone, Donald Soper and the former Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend David Jenkins, were the exception rather than the rule.

We don't like to see men of the cloth (let alone women of the cloth) getting arrested outside nuclear submarine bases, commissioning reports about poverty or taking on elected governments - leave that to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was alright for the Archbishop of York, Dr David Sentamu, to rail against Robert Mugabe because hardly anybody here liked Zimbawe's dictator.

A priest who offends against the conservative expectations of the silent (agnostic) majority, especially if he seems to be acting out of faith, is likely to end up as a caricature trendy vicar in an Alan Bennett story, as in A Bed Among the Lentils.

Elsewhere, expectations are different. Just after October 9, 1989, the Lutheran church of St Nicholas in Leipzig became the centre of a Monday evening peace demonstration against the Communist East German Government. The state was still celebrating its 40th anniversary when an estimated 50,000 people gathered.

In the weeks that followed, those Monday evening church-based demos grew to 120,000 and then more than 300,000. Reportedly, they continued in Leipzig (and in other cities) until March 1990 - long after the GDR had been tossed into the dustbin of history.

I daresay there are would-be turbulent priests in this country who would love to play a part, probably a central part, in stirring up history-shaping change. You would have thought the goings on at St Paul's was their opportunity; but, as far as I know, the outspoken ones have remained silent, preferring instead to moralise about events in Libya.

Thin Spite OK, Vi...

That's an anagram of THINK POSITIVE, the inspirational exclamation that is the watchword of Bradford's ninth or tenth attempt since 1986 at a community cheer up campaign, to encourage the sceptical among its long-suffering citizenry to always look on the bright side.

Count me among them. When marketing chuggers and politicians bang on earnestly about the importance of being positive, corporate, collective, my instinct is to lift up a corner of the carpet to see what they've been sweeping under it.

I tend to feel the same way whenever English film critics are universal in their praise. I thought No Country For Old Men, which most of them adored, was tedious and incomprehensible. The book wasn't much better. Virtually everyone else I know who has seen it think the film's a masterpiece I saw it again recently, partly to test my own opinion; alas, it was even worse. The villain with his gas tank and 1970s Leonard Cohen hairstyle looked like a sleepwalking dentist. I'd rather watch Hombre. Now that is a masterpiece, dealing with the same themes of nihilism, greed and violence, but much more coherently.

The remake of True Grit, lauded as truer to the spirit of the novel than the John Wayne film, was wordy, worthy, but tiresome, in spite of the best efforts of Jeff Bridges. I suppose I am not a fan of the Cohen Brothers.

Having read some four and five-star reviews of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy I hurried along to see it, in anticipation of a great evening in the cinema. Within five minutes the thing struck me as misconceived. Gary Oldman, who had gained widespread acclaim as George Smiley, was miscast. Not out of his depth but in the wrong part. At the end I knew it was a film I would not want to watch again. Friends, however, thought it was superb.

Peter Hitchens, I have just discovered, felt even more let down than I did. He knows Le Carre's novel, which I don't, and remembers the BBC television serial with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, which I didn't see. Some of his readers found the film too slow and left before the end. For me the telling of the tale was slow but the technique of telling it, fast choppy cuts across time, was confusing. At the end I had no idea how Smiley had discovered that Bill Hayden was the Russian double agent. The film deterred me from buying the book, whereas Hombre had me grabbing for Elmore Leonard's slim novel the first time I saw it.

An old woman with sly sniper's eyes once remarked that I had a closed mind. Not being particularly quick on the verbal come-back, I didn't tell her that people who know me have little trouble finding the equivlalent of 'Open Sesame' to engage my attention. In my defence I went to see The King's Speech simply because a shred of it had been filmed in Bradford. The critics loved it, so I was sceptical. I came away thinking it a fine film, centring on the unlikely friendship between two very different characters.

I have no problem with emotionalism or 'love interest' except where, Hollywood style, it is added in for commercial interest, which I think of as slop. Men and women with perfect teeth, impeccable personal hygiene and untroubled by the imperatives of hunger, thirst, belly and bowel movements, declare their undying love as the world goes up in flames or their trains leave the station in opposite directions. THINK POSITIVE! I hear the deceitful voice of my bad angel say, until the voice of my good angel says BOLLOCKS!

My tendency is to move, after due consideration, from a negative to a positive. That's not how it is for everybody, merely how the key seems to fit my lock.

The Hacker...

There is a scene in the movie The Lives of Others where a writer, a loyal support of the East German state, indignantly asks the former head of the state security police why the Stasi had not considered him dangerous enough to place under surveillance.

"Oh but you were, constantly," the slug-like secret policeman tells him, nodding ironically at the writer's revealed conceit.

As one of life's refusniks, who refuses to subject himself to a mobile phone's ring-tone and the idiot prattling that usually follows, I am unlikely to be one of the gallant 4,000 hacked into by former News of the World journos.

Unlike Hugh Grant who, I thought, probably accurately described the Metropolitan Police, News International, 10 Downing Street cartel as a "protection racket". The higher-ups move in the same social circles thinking they are immune to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences - what goes around eventually comes around. The Prime Minister is discovering that.

Anyone who has glanced at books such as Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Propagandist From Crimea to Kosovo and John Simpson's Unrealiable Sources, will be aware that 'rat fucking', a phrase coined by President Richard Nixon's henchmen, has a long history. He was brought down by his association with people arrested, charged and indicted for organising the Watergate building burglary, including his special counsel Charles Colson.

For Colson read Coulson?

About the only new thing in the latest revelations about how some members of the press operate (more than 300 of them according to Newsnight) is the technology.

This bear of staggeringly inadequate brain power is neither shocked nor appalled. Those epithets of moral outrage, so righteously voiced by most of yesterday's old Question Timers remind me of the protestations of those public notables who, not so long ago, used their economic power to take out Super Injunctions to prevent hacks from revealing the truth about their extra-curricular activities.

In The Lives of Others the writer does his best work in spite of the sanctions of the state, stung into risking his liberty because of the suicide of a despairing black-listed friend.

To do it, however, he has to resort to subterfuge; in effect he has to break the law of the German Democratic Republic. His adherence to truth rather than party loyalty is tested. But any feeling of moral superiority he feels is crushed by the death of his lover, a woman blackmailed by the Stasi into betraying him.

I'd like to be able to say with conviction that as long as the rich and powerful are free to use the law to protect their dirty little secrets and maintain their public image, the media will be obliged to use whatever means deemed necessary by unscrupulous news executives to get at the truth.

But it's not that simple. Just as the poor usually prey on the poor rather than the rich, the press gangs up on insignificant celebrities and the victims of crime and war to keep us boobies, to use George Bernard Shaw's expression of contempt, distracted from what's really going on.

With all eyes on Downing Street and News International's Wapping HQ, British Gas slyly chose to announce it was jacking up energy prices next month. After Sunday The News of the World won't be able to screw you; but there are plenty of other organs that will.

As for Rupert Murdoch, I wouldn't be surprised if he is awarded the BSkyB contract - after he has got rid of red-top Rebekah Brooks, kicked son James up the arse and issued a public mea culpa. He has too many friends in high places, probably has an oil-field of dirt on all of them including past and present incumbents of Number 10.

In spite of his promised inquiries, David Cameron's position is far more precarious than the Dirty Digger's. DC may be BC before the year is out.

The Green Thing...

Following Panorama's piece about junk mail and the costs of disposing of it (at least £700,000 as in-fill in Cornwall), I decided to post the following item, passed on to me by my friend David Knight:-

In the queue at the shop, the young cashier told the old woman that she should bring her own bags in future because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The old lady apologised, explaining to the young man: "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The cashier said sententiously: "That's our problem today. The former generation did not care enough to save our planet's environment."

He was right: that generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, people returned their milk bottles. They got money back for pop bottles and beer bottles (a practice still in place in Sweden). The shop sent them back to the plant to be washed, sterilized and refilled; the same bottles were used over and over. So they were recycled.

But they didn't have the green thing back in that customer's day.

In her day they walked up stairs because they didn't have escalators in every shop and office building. They walked to the shops and didn't climb into 300-horsepower machines every time they had to go a mile or two for milk or bread.

Because they didn't have the green thing.

Back then, they washed nappies because they didn't have the disposable kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry the washing.

The green thing was sadly lacking.

Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers and sisters. There was one radio or television in the house, and the TV had a small screen not one the size of Wales. In the kitchen they blended and stirred by hand because they didn't have electrical appliances to do everything for them.

When they packaged a fragile item to send by post they used screwed-up newspaper not polystrene or plastic bubble wrap.

Back in the dark old days they didn't burn petrol just to cut the grass, they pushed a mower that ran on human muscle. They exercised, played games, so they didn't need to go to a health club to run on an electric-powered treadmill.

But, as the lady said, they didn't have the green thing then.

People took the tram or bus and kids rode their bikes to school or rode on the school bus instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service. They had one electrical socket in a rtoom, not an entire bank of them to power a dozen appliances. Nor did they need a computerised gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest Pizza Hut.

What sad buggers they were, without the self-satisfying green thing to make them feel good about themselves.