Raging Ralph!

CMM’S own miserable ‘Brexit bar-steward’ on what’s wrong with the modern generation! My motorcycling started, albeit illegally, in the late 1970s aboard my old dear’s C70 Chicken Chaser. I made a ‘spare’ key for it in school in metalwork so that I could have illicit rides any time my parents were out.

I was talking to the young lad over the road, when he was attending the same school that I went to all those years ago. I was waxing lyrical about how my metalwork teacher had inspired me with a lifelong love of engineering. Not any more, he informed me; the nanny state had decreed that virtually any tool is too nasty and dangerous for today’s little darlings. Apparently, they had one CNC machine that they weren’t allowed near lest it should bite ’em. The nearest they got to an understanding of machining was to write a few lines of code to programme it. No wonder this country is knackered; the only engineering companies left are run and staffed by old farts of our generation and as we retire there is precious little fresh blood taking our places. The youth are great at castigating our generation that created the wealth they are enjoying, for ‘destroying’ the planet. When I was a lad, when an appliance broke, we had skilled folk who would repair things, whereas nowadays they just buy new. The vast majority of our generation would do minor works on their own cars and bikes and a bloke unable to bleed the brakes and do an oil change was likely seen as ‘a bit weird’.

And another thing – the youth of today are feckin’ illiterate. A friend of mine did some teaching at a further education college and was horrified to discover that the kids who were supposed to be the cream of the crop had no understanding of basic grammar or spelling. I swear many think emojis are part of the alphabet...

And how can they get away with selling paint stripper that simply doesn’t strip paint because the nanny state has taken out the active ingredient? Both the bloody tree huggers and the health and safety Nazis are forever banning products before they have found a viable alternative.

So bad is it, that we can’t manufacture anything in what used to be the proud workshops of the world where ‘Made in England’ was a mark of quality.

No, nowadays we get everything made in the Far East, where they don’t give a shit about the planet or their workforce, and then ship it to the other side of the world in massively polluting container ships just so that our right-on, liberal do-gooders can claim the moral high ground because we don’t allow it to happen here. I could go on… but it seems I've gone up to my allowed/alloted space!