If civilisation is not to fall we must become more civil

IS Scottish society becoming more nedular? That’s an extremely difficult question to consider. Here’s the answer: yes. You read in your Herald this week about theatre audiences being unruly, and inebriated citizens at concerts singing along in their own special key.

On visits to the city, my world is more the streets. The mean streets. Nothing to do with the underworld. I’m mainly talking about shopping. By mean streets I mean high streets.

It’s not just the exponential growth in scuzzy denizens wearing tracksuit bottoms, or the cruel, calculating faces of many passers-by, like weasels in The Wind in the Willows. It’s an air of tension and everyone on a short fuse. Knowing how precious ratepayers get about their cities,

I will identify them only by their initials. P, therefore, was the biggest disappointment. I’d written of it previously as a particularly polite place, notably recalling when I had to walk through a gang of neds on a street corner.

“Sorry, mate,” they said, parting to let me through. “You’re a fine gentleman, indeed. We can see that.” But last time I was there, I encountered only sullen rudeness. Someone called me a richard-head, to use the polite term. Baggy athletic trousers abounded.

In D, town rather than city, I was the only person not wearing a baseball cap, the millinery indicating fallen moral standards.

A was cold and unfriendly. In three months, other than on renting a flat and leaving it, I never spoke to anyone once. Tell a lie: I’d a brief exchange with the assistant in

HMV when buying an Ingmar Bergman video. “You want the number for the Samaritans, sir?”

“No thanks, it’s written here on my wrist.”

True, I never socialised, apart from visiting the park, but nobody speaks to you there. Even the ducks didn’t quack. But it was the amount of folk stoatin’ aboot in daytime oot their faces on something that staggered me. True, I was in a cheap part of town, but I hadn’t reckoned on such problems being so visible.

In the capital city of E, it was behaviour on the roads that appalled. Three times in four days, other drivers tooted at me. I was right every time: stopping to let a bus out; not crossing onto a backed-up junction; not breenging into busy traffic where there was an obstacle.

Before that visit, I’d never been tooted at once in a decade. Now they were tooting like a deranged modern jazz ensemble. I started hearing toots in my sleep. I envisaged being lowered into my grave to the sound of an angry toot.

Off the road, trying on shoes in Markies, I looked up to see two women in the nearby coffee shop staring at me insolently. The tubby one’s jaw hung open and, when I glared back, she scowled as if offended. True, with my many foot problems, I’d given the shoes a decent workout, pirouetting and doing squats.

All the same, to find such rude

gawping in

Markies; I was seconds away from pelting them both with slippers, before realising that would be descending to their level.

I know that, since ancient times, sensitive folk have complained about everything getting worse while, in general, it actually got better. At least until their civilisation collapsed. Is our civilisation collapsing? That’s a difficult question, requiring much thought. But, yes, it is.

Totally pathological

HOW sad that Lilt will soon be no more. The fizzy drink “with the totally tropical taste” is being replaced or at best rebranded.

I must confess I haven’t drunk Lilt for donkey’s years. It was one of my favourites in my teens until I grew up and gravitated towards healthier drinks like whisky and gin.

But, for me, it rekindles disturbing embers of memory. On a walking tour of the Yorkshire Moors, I got lost. Lacking a proper map, I relied foolishly on a rubbish drawing on a leaflet provided by a tour company that organised B&Bs on the route.

The weather was blazing hot, and

I’d already walked many miles. At a junction of paths, I headed in the wrong direction (choice of two: always wrong), then came round in a circle to where I’d started out.

So, I headed in the other direction, encountering not another soul for ages until dog walkers started appearing, bringing with them the promise of civilisation nearby.

By now, I was panting with thirst and, completely out of nowhere, or at least from my teenage past, had started fantasising about the drink with the totally tropical taste.

Deranged with heat, my eyes bulging, my stare manic, I staggered into the dog walkers, grabbing their shirts, and shouting in their faces: “Lilt! Lilt!”

They ran off but, eventually, I came to a pretty village, walked into a hostelry, and ordered a pint of bitter and a flagon of Lilt. Alas, they had no Lilt, so I had water or some other rubbish. Downed both drinks in seconds and demanded the same again. With my unkempt appearance, air of derangement, and peculiar imbibing proclivities, I’m sure any prior prejudices the publican and patrons may have entertained about Scotchmen were amply confirmed.