I felt sorry for those freed hostages when I saw them disembarking at Heathrow's terminal three. It's a hell hole. I know, because I was there the other evening putting my 84-year-old Aunt Doris on her plane back to New Zealand.

We had an hour or so to kill so we looked for the bar. The noise was ear-splitting. The worst sort of aggressive, repetitive, brainless pop music played at top volume. To get the barman to understand my order I had to do hand signals and he had to practise lip-reading. I asked him to turn the racket down and received in return a scowl any Premiership footballer would have been proud of.

No one in that bar wanted to listen to that sort of noise at all, never mind at full blast. I know because I went round and asked them. "Not what you want to be met with when you've just flown 4,000 miles, is it?" and "Bloody awful!" were typical of the comments I got. I can understand that there is a section of society so depraved that they will pay good money to stay up all night in the clubs to listen to this audible filth; but there were none of those at terminal three - so why play it? Answer: because the young bar staff are the clubbing sort and that's what they want. What ever happened to tolerance, forbearance, consideration for others? Everywhere public life is being marred and scarred by the yob culture.

They are doing a lot of reconstruction in terminal three and there were contractors' polite notices all over the walls. "We are building a first class environment and we apologise for any inconvenience" - words to that effect. I would have preferred the noise of pneumatic drills to the horrible pop decibels we were compelled to listen to. No wonder they call the place "terminal". Aunt Doris, elderly ear drums shattered and nerves - already on edge with apprehension at having to face the long flight to Auckland - jangled beyond endurance. We left the bar and made for the check-in desk. There's a convenient lift to take you down to it from the bar. Suddenly the lift door flies open and out they charge: a small horde of the undead, mouths gaping, faces again locked into the trademark yob snarl; all "f******" and blinding.

It was the same on the tube on the way back to the city. Oafs with their feet on the seat right under the sign that says: "Please do not put your feet on the seats". Discarded newspapers and half-eaten burgers scattered about the carriage. Other members of the undead still eating their burgers. Great sweaty hunks in their designer trainers, baseball caps, hissing personal stereos. They sit so aggressively, knees thrust forward to the middle of the aisle, that they are a threat to anyone trying to pass.

Is it always going to be like this? Have manners and decency gone for ever? Well, this is cool Britannia and it's not cool to be polite or considerate. "Cool" means there's no such thing as a smile, only a leer. That airport bar and lift, the tube train, the station, the late-night streets, the foul graffiti, the noise and vomit - what does it make you think of except a post-apocalyptic trash horror film?

What we are now forced to endure is the fulfilment of the prophecy made some years ago by the economist JK Galbraith: "Private affluence and public squalor." And yet all the talk on radio and TV, all the chic columns in the glossy magazines, tell us that we're so wonderfully "modernised", so much better than we ever were in the past. It's not true. It might be true if you can afford to travel by chauffeur-driven limousine or private jet, or if you can get to Tuscany without having to go via the tube and the airport bar. But it's not true for the great majority of us. Rampant, ignorant, barging selfishness rules England today.

I'm haunted by that word "terminal". Things can't go on like this indefinitely. I have the feeling there's going to be an ending soon - not with a whimper, but a bang.