Teaching children manners at school may seem like madness, but without this basic instruction, we'll all slip further into the mire.

GOOD morning. I hope you're well. Anything interesting planned for the day? A lesson in small talk, perhaps... Pupils at a top independent school are being taught their manners. They've signed up for a 14-week course on how to make conversation, lay a table, dress appropriately. For although pupils at £22,000 a year Millfield get brilliant exam results, they might, fears their headteacher, be lacking in social skills.

And when it comes to getting a job, social skills are increasingly important. Not much point being the Brain of Britain with a string of A-stars and a first class degree if you can't get on with your colleagues or customers.

Yet as family life gets more splintered and we all spend a lot less time together, have fewer meals together, spend fewer evenings just sitting talking to each other, we're in danger of losing the art of getting along nicely. And knowing how to use a knife and fork. A head teacher in Sunderland has had to take on extra staff to teach primary school children not to eat with their fingers. Table manners are just as important as encouraging healthy eating and exercise, says Anne Mackay of Sir John Bosco Primary School.

It's not just table manners. Children spend less time playing together unsupervised by adults and so have less chance to work out their own rules, find their own way of solving problems.

It is a fact - though it takes some people longer than others to realise it - that being pleasant and smiling gets you a lot further than being rude. What's worrying is that even somewhere like Millfield has to put on special lessons for sixth formers. You'd think that by 17 years old, somewhere along the line these privileged youngsters would have learnt something.

Education authorities insist that information technology should be an integral part of every school curriculum. Well, shouldn't manners be too? Parents must do their bit and the schools should re-inforce it, every day and at every opportunity.

After all, bad behaviour in the classroom - shouting, swearing, just ignoring the teacher - is all just an extension of basic bad manners.

Good manners are not just out-dated etiquette. They are a way of showing care for other people's feelings and are therefore the bedrock of a decent society. If you always consider other people, it starts with something simple like not shouting or smoking in restaurants, and goes through to other modern ills such as road rage, neighbours from hell and rowdy Friday nights in town centres. It's all to do with not putting your interests and demands above those of other people. In fact, it probably leads right up to not digging up the body of an 82-year-old because you object to her son-in-law's business. If you can judge a society by the way it treats its dead, then ours is in danger of meltdown.

Compared with that horror, please and thank you and a little social chit chat might seem incredibly trivial. But they are all connected, all part of the same family. And if we mastered them all, it would make everyone's lives safer and definitely a great deal more pleasant.

It's been good to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

SHAME that Rookhope has apparently had its last leek show. Young gardeners have neither the time nor the inclination to grow show leeks, and so another tradition dies. But doubtless new traditions are even now starting and will flourish in their turn.

It's a far cry from the great years of leek growing when my uncle in Cumbria - determined to show that the Welsh knew about leeks - entered a leek show and heard he'd won ninth prize. He took ages to collect it, thinking it would be little more than a box of chocolates or a five bob postal order. It turned out to be a colour television.

If that was ninth prize, then what on earth did first and second get?

YES, there is a pension time bomb ticking away. Yes, we should all be putting by more for our old age. But how?

For 20 years I have paid into a private pension scheme and according to my latest statement, it is now worth less than I have paid into it. I would have been better off with a biscuit tin under the bed. To get my money back I will probably have to live until I'm 159. At least.

And, of course, because I will have that pathetic little sum, I won't qualify for the Government's top-up scheme. So all that prudent saving has actually left me worse off than if I'd frittered the lot on bottles of wine and strappy shoes. Thousands of the self-employed are in an identical position.

Meanwhile, Government ministers on their generous, index-linked pensions, paid for by the rest of us, have the nerve to lecture us on our lack of foresight.

Words fail me. I think I'll go shopping.

Published: ??/??/2004