Corporal punishment works as a deterrent? Maybe if it's really savage. Or if it's just a threat hanging over you. If it's a routine thing without being savage you just get to shrug it off.

When I was at school it was a regular enough thing. I honestly cannot remember ever being deterred from anything by the thought I might get beaten for it. I doubt if it did me any harm, or any good. A pretty pointless exercise.

When it's suggested that somehow deterioration in how we treat each other, if there is such, is the result of cutting out corporal punishment and so forth, it occurs to me to wonder how come there are other countries that have done without that kind of thing for years and without giving the impression that this leads to a breakdown of society.

And how true is really, over and above the fact that bad news makes good news, both in the media and in interpersonal gossip?

Driving off to the Mudgathering at Milton Keynes (Stony Stratford) as the weekend my car started making horrible noises. Colin(who plays the bodhran), whom I normally rely on, with his small garage, was up to his neck.

So I went into one of those KwikFit garages, which I never use as a rule. Up on the ramp goes the car, and the young lad sees it's a clamp that's gone, so he pops out the back and rummages around and then sorts it out. "Here you are" he says - and insists there's no charge.

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And the point of that is, it's the kind of story people don't talk to you about normally, because grumbling is second nature to us. Or they quote it when it happens on some overseas trip as a marker of how much nicer people are away from here. WE kid ourselves that people are much nastier than they are, and then feel an obligation to live up to it. Or rather, live down to it. (And if it so happens we are in a place where people are in fact pretty nasty morer times than not, we assume it's really like that all over.)