"What indeed is going on ! It’s a nightmare. A class of little girls is knifed by a madman - not even a man – a mere nutcase of a boy of 17 - and the whole country erupts with maniacal demonstrators adding further injuries to police, police-dogs and horses. I just don’t understand. Their excuse is they think he’s an immigrant Muslim – neither of which he is – but even if he were, his crime is just as repugnant to British Muslims as to the rest of the population. Things have deteriorated ever since we turned from being Englishmen to being Brits. Do you remember the Englishman – a dull, stolid, staid but reliable citizen who knew what was cricket and what was not, suspicious of foreign ways and long-haired artists, down-to-earth, honest, whose word was his bond, who queued up in orderly fashion waiting his turn ? That was the world we grew up in, me old mate, - when school gangs were just a group of like-minded classmates like Jennings, Darbishire, Venables and Temple – or William’s “Outlaws” of Ginger, Douglas and Henry – who knew that the place of knives was in the kitchen and who never even conceived they could be used as weapons. I’m afraid we that you and me, and all the other old fogies of our generation who have survived - are the aliens in this world where adults behave like lunatic kids." [From my good friend of 70-odd years. Text is extract from his email this week. Background is our old school; where we both met in 1950 ...] Sic transit gloria mundi.