WELL that's it. The world has definitely turned a little further. Bob Dylan is moaning about his 16-year-old daughter's taste in music. Yes, Dylan. Icon to a generation, one of the most influential figures in 20th century youth culture, sounding just like my dad.

"Everything on the radio sounds hideous," he says in an interview with USA Today. "I get into fights with her if I talk about music."

That wasn't a rumble of thunder you heard. It was my late father, sitting on his cloud and chortling.

He and I too had fights about music when I was 16 - most of them about Dylan. "Can't someone shoot him and put us all out of our misery?" he would say when forced to listen to a fragment of Blowing in the Wind or Masters of War.

But then, my father was nearly as old as Dylan is now - 60.

In an age when other pop stars of that age are refusing to grow old and prancing around behaving much as they ever did -- think Mick Jagger, Cliff Richard, Rod Stewart - then there is something rather reassuring about Dylan's arguments with young Desiree Gabrielle.

The lines between youth and old age are increasingly blurring - pensioners can wear the same clothes as pre-schoolers, rock 'n'roll daddies go to glitzy parties with their super sophisticated children, 60-year-olds pose in bikinis and when did you last hear anyone use that phrase about mutton and lamb?

But if our generation is still turning on, tuning in and letting it all hang out, what does that leave for our children to rebel against or call their own? No wonder they flock to listen to Eminem. If they can't shock us by their attitudes to drugs and sex, than at least they can upset our right on sixties liberalism by being homophobic.

And if we - like June Whitfield's mother figure in AbFab, - just insist on saying "Very nice, dear." Then all we do is drive them to further extremes.

Teenagers need grouchy old dads to say the things that grouchy old dads have always said. That's what they're there for.

It's just a bit disconcerting for us grown-ups to find that it's our young, rebellious, mould-breaking hero doing the grouching.

Maybe I should give Eminem another go.

THE NHS is desperate for nurses, plundering the world to find them. Within the next few years apparently we are also going to need another 80,000 lorry drivers. (80,000? Is there enough room on the roads for all those wagons, or will they all end up permanently trundling over the A66 in one gigantic convoy?).

There are 1,600 asylum seekers in the camp at Sangatte near Calais. They are desperate to come here. We are apparently desperate to keep them out.

I don't suppose any of them are nurses or can drive a lorry.

IT'S been a brilliant year for blackberries. The hedges are hanging heavy with great fat juicy fruits, absolutely delicious. In a half hour stroll up the lane I picked effortlessly nearly a carrier bag full - some for now with some of the windfall apples, the rest in the freezer for a taste of late summer on a grim February day. But am I the only one picking them?

In between my visits, the fruit seems undisturbed. Although I've seen plenty of people walking, no one seems to stop and sample the fruit, let alone take any home. OK, I'm just a peasant, always on the look out for food for free. But not even I can pick them all, not even the birds can eat them all. And it seems a wicked waste to see such delicious food simply rotting.

Maybe people don't like blackberries. But the truth is probably a lot more depressing.

We are losing the connection between the food we eat and food that grows.

Brainwashed by hygiene rules, antiseptics, disinfectants, food scares and sell-by dates, we no longer trust food unless it is has been handled by half a dozen different people, wrapped in polystyrene and clingfilm, transported miles and costs a fortune.

Ah well. Don't know why I'm complaining - all the more blackberries for me.

OH gosh, poor Nick Cartmel. You could feel yourself blush with embarrassment on his behalf. He was the barrister who told Newcastle Crown Court that the Queen Mother had died.

But you can hardly blame him. Bad enough that rumours had been sweeping the internet. But worse, much worse, was the attitude of television reporters.

There they were, every bulletin, commenting on whether the QM had gone to church or not. Or to the games or not. And what her staff had said. Or what someone might have said to someone who might have misunderstood it and passed it on incorrectly. They were long-winded, mealy-mouthed and like a pack of vultures circling expectantly.

All they were really saying was, "She's not dead yet." But any more of this gloom and doom and she probably will be.

Look, the Queen Mother is 101. On the law of averages, she's not going to have many years left. So can we at least, leave her to enjoy those years in peace without everyone watching open mouthed for her to fall off her perch.

And give the royal-watching vultures a nice long holiday.