Many things have vanished which I always thought to be no more than basic decency, good manners, consideration for others. I was taught that it was just not done to interrupt someone but people today believe that verbal communication necessarily includes repeatedly interrupting one another.When I was young, even the most irreconcilable differences would be expressed in relatively low voices and mild words. But now it is as if conversation, discussion, argument, all have gone out of the window. Two people can communicate only by what would have been called squabbling. The aim of each is to establish at every point the inferiority of the other. I have asked people what they would lose if they were to co-operate rather than join battle, but such answers as they gave me indicated that they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and couldn’t be bothered.I shall never understand today’s frenzy to always get ahead of everyone else physically. You see it in the way people drive cars and board buses, you see it in the way they never form an orderly queue at the milk booth.I was deliberately gender-specific. Men show these traits more than do women. Aggression has always been greater among males, but friends whom I asked, a psychologist and two psychiatrists, told me that males feel societal and familial pressures to succeed more strongly than do females. They said that women and girls are moving in the same direction; and I regret that this matches my own experience. Small things add up. Twenty years ago I began slipping in a self-addressed postcard when sending someone photographs or papers or a book. Ever fewer have written five words on these cards and posted them. Many do not acknowledge receiving what I send them by e-mail. Do they not understand that I shall wonder whether they got what I sent and also worry when my living is at stake?People make promises, often unasked, and then fail to keep them. Rarely do they apologise. Others make appointments and then neither show up nor telephone to say that they will not come. Do they not realise that I may have put aside work, or made edible or other preparations to receive them? People are known to grumble more, and about more things, as they grow older. To some degree this may be much like receding gums and thinning bones; but it also reflects an inability to adjust to changing values. At one end are those are barely affected, at the other are those who are hit badly. I wonder where I fit. Can it mean something that two of my nieces have told their children to call me ‘‘Dinosaur Gramps’’?
