Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Is it me? You'll be starting to gather by now that I'm a bit of a Grumpy Old Man. There is a bit of truth there, but it's not all entirely without cause. A lot of it's to do with the dumbing down of Britain (all right, Scotland if you're reading this Gary).

Take graffiti for example. I'm fairly sure that graffiti had a lot more thought put into it when I were nobbut a lad. Leaving aside real artists like Banksy, graffiti is pretty uniformly dire, so the claim that it's a genuine art form is undermined badly. Mostly, graffiti now seems to revolve around football, PIRA, or the Pope. Of course, there is a new breed of graffiti artist with the resurgence of the card carrying socialist incapable of writing anything without quoting Marx and Engels. The inability to say anything without recourse to constant quotation is hardly creative.At my school, someone once wrote on the wall of the boys' toilets, "Down with the Establishment.". Quick as a flash, a reply was posted, reading, "If you take down the establishment, where do we all pee?" Now that's proper graffiti. No? I'll get my coat.

Then there's poo. When did adults start using the word 'poo'? I stopped when I was about eight years old. Far be it from me to advise you as to how you refer to ordure, but come on, people, it's akin to describing your sexual parts as willies, pee pees or front bottoms. Oh wait, we do that too. While we're at it, I hate doctors who talk about your 'waterworks'. What is this, Monopoly or a doctor's surgery? Can we go back to saying crap, shit or even ordure?

Supermarket tills are next. Remember when the girl at the checkout was able to figure out for herself how much change to give you? Now, we buy stuff at £9.99 and have to wait while Colossus waits a minute for effect, makes a lot of pretend printing noises, gives it another couple of seconds and then tells her to give you a penny in change. That's one penny, by the way, not one pence. Just saying. While we're at it, no I don't want double bloody glazing and if I do I'll ask, so don't approach me at the shop entrance.

Basically, it seems like we've lowered lots of bars. I don't mean we should expect all our kids to be rocket scientists, but is it too much to ask that we at least assume until we know otherwise that they're capable of being such? We don't exactly set a shining example, do we? Graffiti, poo and checkouts are all signs of the imminent collapse of civilisation. Trust me.