Crime is rampant and the NHS is a basket case – Britain is not the place it used to be
AT the weekend, I was loading my car with items for storage and put a box of my mother’s cherished old china on the back seat.
I went back inside the house and, when I returned barely a minute later, it had been stolen. It wasn’t worth much in cash terms, it was purely sentimental. But that’s not the point.
She had kept those little ceramic knick-knacks for the best part of 50 years and, in the blink of an eye, they were in the hands of an opportunistic thief who didn’t give a flying fig for their provenance. Sigh.
After that, even though the car was right outside my door, I locked it for the intervening seconds between loads.
It may seem like a small concern compared to someone suffering, say, a personal tragedy.
But the mostly unchallenged petty theft blighting our neighbourhoods is important in one regard.
It illustrates how largely law-abiding people feel abandoned by the authorities, which show little interest in helping us feel safe in our homes while simultaneously squeezing us for every penny to pay for “services” that we are not benefiting from.
It’s a fact of life that when the electorate feels safe, both physically and financially, their largesse towards others knows no bounds.
But when they feel destabilised and forgotten, they adopt an “every man for himself” attitude that goes against the “big society” ideas of any civilised country.
The result? Britain is not the place it used to be.
As a kid in the late 1960s, I would leave my little Raleigh bicycle unattended outside the house for hours.
Today, I daren’t ride my coveted road bike unless I can take it inside with me at the other end.
Otherwise, the supposedly impenetrable lock will be broken in seconds by professional steal-to-order gangs, who appear to be thriving while largely untroubled by any police action.
Similarly, I drive a battered, 11-year-old Mini.
But in my neighbourhood of South London, anyone daring to buy themselves a nice car runs the risk of it not being outside their house the following morning.
Neighbourhood app Nextdoor, which connects you to those living in your area, is littered with despairing people asking others to look out for their stolen car because, guess what, the police who they pay for have shown zero interest in helping them.
Dreaded e-scooter
In the Sixties and Seventies, we also left front or back doors unlocked all day and, in the summer, all the windows would be opened to let in air.
Now? I won’t even nip upstairs to get something without obsessively locking the back door, and my ground-floor windows are never open unless I’m sitting right next to them.
To those of you who live in the countryside, this may sound extreme.
But to most of us living in cities, this blight of petty crime is all too real.
Be it your car that’s stolen, your bike, your plants, a parcel from your doorstep, or your bag snatched from your hands by someone on a dreaded e-scooter, it all adds up to a general feeling that organised gangs and opportunistic druggies looking for their next hit are ruling our streets rather than the police and “justice” system we once trusted to protect us.
Meanwhile, all we hear is the Government saying it’s going to tax us even more. But what do we get for that?
The NHS is a managerial basket case, our public transport system is blighted by strikes, there’s a passport backlog, you can’t get a driving test, we’re shelling out millions to house migrants in hotels and around half of all civil servants are still working from home. The list goes on.
In 1992, when it looked like Labour leader Neil Kinnock might win the general election, The Sun famously wrote a headline saying: “Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”
Irrespective of who wins next year, they’ve got their work cut out to make it feel like a place you want to spend your old age in.
It was affair bet Andrew and Leila would split
RUMOUR has it that Broadchurch actor Andrew Buchan hopes to reunite with his wife, Downton Abbey actress Amy Nuttall after leaving her for his Better co-star Leila Farzad in February.
He met Leila, who is also married and a parent, on the set of the BBC crime drama.
But she has now reportedly returned to her husband, James Maizels.
If all the above is true, it’s perhaps a reminder that, once the frisson of subterfuge is no longer powering the passion of an extra-marital affair, you swiftly reach the sobering realisation that it might not be worth all the devastation it can cause in both family homes.
And that, unlike Andrew and Leila’s on-screen drama, it rarely turns out to be Better.
This is no way to live
TECH tycoon Bryan Johnson says “I currently have no plans to die” and is spending £1.6million a year in the pursuit of eternal youth.
Californian (where else?) Bryan, 45, has a team of more than 30 doctors keeping tabs on his vital organs, he takes 80 vitamins and minerals daily, eats 70lb of pureed vegetables a month, exercises for an hour a day and goes to bed at 8.30pm every night.
He also eats a strict diet of 1,977 calories a day, including flaxseed, almond milk, walnuts and berries and has less than six per cent body fat.
He calls this extreme lifestyle Project Blueprint and says, drum roll, that a female guinea pig has also agreed to take part and will be revealed to great fanfare any day now.
Is it really that big a deal?
This dreary regime sounds not dissimilar to that practised by many A-list actresses who profess to be stuffing their faces while physically resembling a pre-pubescent teen.
As for the rest of us, we’d rather have the occasional beer and biryani and live a few days fewer than sign up to this bore-fest.
Barbie berks
NEARLY 40 per cent of women are happy for men to do the cooking at a BBQ, a survey reports.
Why? Because they think the combo of raw meat, fire and the open air brings out “the caveman” in blokes and helps them feel good about themselves.
And 19 per cent of women reckon it keeps the chaps away from jobs they are “incapable of handling”, like setting the table and preparing side dishes.
Ye gods. When will this infantilisation of grown men ever end?
Taxi driver’s cabbing a laugh
BRITTNY BUTTON, wife of former F1 champion Jenson, says his driving is terrible because he is always “braking too late”.
Better than not at all, I suppose.
But it reminds me of when, as a regular customer of a minicab firm in South London, I would frequently get the same driver who would duck and dive around the back streets at an alarming pace while I clung, white-knuckled, to the door handle.
“Have you always been a cab driver?” I managed to utter as we did 60 to zero at a traffic light.
“No, I used to be a jump jockey,” came the reply.
Eric a lesson to all
WAR hero Eric “Winkle” Brown only wanted his memoir released after his death, and it makes fascinating reading.
He was given up for adoption by his impoverished mother and went on to be dubbed Britain’s Greatest Pilot thanks to his fearlessness during World War Two.
In a battle with German Condor fighters, his plane was hit and he was rendered unconscious.
When he came round, he managed to regain control despite the blood in his eyes, and for the rest of his life a piece of armoured glass remained his jaw as it was too tricky to remove.
After a couple of crashes into water he knew he had to practise underwater escape from a confined place in the dark, and did this by hanging upside down in his garage after nightfall, with the lights out.
Eric, known as Winkle because of his small stature, died in 2016 at the age of 97.
Hopefully, his story might give some much-needed perspective to the next person who claims to be traumatised after someone mistakenly fails to use their preferred pronoun.
Covid curse
THE week before last I was marvelling with friends about how I hadn’t yet had Covid.
I mused that I must have an incredibly strong immune system.
Then it felled me and I went down like a Giant Redwood with root rot.
That’ll teach me to show off.