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THE makers of the television programme Grumpy Old Men/Women have finally acknowledged its contributors were far from old and (I would argue) nowhere near grumpy enough.

The programme might more accurately have been called "Slightly Irritated Middle Aged or even Younger Men/Women". Not as catchy a title, I concede. The series now calls itself "The Grumpy Guide to."

More accurate, though it doesn't yet quite plumb the depths of grumpiness that I share with the majority of my contemporaries - we who are nudging at the threshold of "old" - the pre-zimmer generation.

We have more to be grumpy about than the comparative youths that populate the programme because we can remember those days, that now sound like the stuff of fiction - days when people repaired things, when shops were all different and had different products, when food was fresh and not wrapped in three layers of landfill fodder, when bank managers knew our names and we knew theirs and relationships were built up.

We lived during a time when there were three television channels offering programmes that were excellent, rather than three hundred amongst which you are hard pressed to find something you want to watch, a time when you really could cycle to school or work without being mown down, asphyxiated or find your bike nicked at the end of the day, a time before yellow lines, speed cameras, congestion zones, when victims of crime were given more consideration than the poor deprived criminal, a time before call centres and the "Help Line" which vies with "For the convenience of our customers" for the title "Misleading expression of the decade."

And what do we get hot under the collar about? What mobilises protests and marches? Nothing much.

The last significant public demonstration of any magnitude was by a bunch of people who like chasing small furry animals and killing them.

We don't apparently care a great deal that petrol now costs more in the UK than it does anywhere else in the "first world" (if such a place exists), that our public transport systems are woefully inadequate, that our direct and indirect national and local taxation soars at the same time as services that we took for granted forty years ago are cut and reduced, that our young people have to put themselves in hock for twenty years to get the university educations our generation got for free.

As Bashful said to Happy "Let's get Grumpy!"

7:28pm Thursday 17th April 2008

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