YOUNG people are amazingly adept at working the latest gizmos. Their speed at texting on the minuscule keypads of modern mobile phones staggers anyone over a certain age.

They took to Walkmans like ducks to water. Now it's iPods. As for programming the video, a severe challenge to the over-40s: ancient hat.

But at least one gadget of an earlier age baffles today's up-and-coming generation. The alarm clock. Experience instructors will soon be showing adolescents exactly how to operate this highly-complex instrument. Set pointer at time alarm needed. Press button marked with alarm symbol. Get up when alarm sounds...

The last instruction is the most crucial. For the "alarm-clock classes" are part of an "Entry to Employment" course dreamed up by John Prescott's Department for Education and Skills.

It would be easy to highlight this as just another of those "you-couldn't-make-it-up" April Fool stories that appear every day. But it indicates a failing among young people more serious than an unfamiliarity with an alarm clock. For despite their mastery of computer kit in all its forms, they apparently lack skills taken for granted among earlier generations. Like getting to work on time. And doing what their employer asks.

A DFES report states frankly that a purpose of the new course is to make adolescents "realise that when an employer asks them to do something it is not unreasonable to do it". The report estimates that around a million young people do not possess such simple "life skills".

It needs to be said that most young people do not fall into this category. Most will hold their own with any generation of the past. Still, it really is coming to something when a significant proportion of young people need "instruction" on how to catch a bus or a train - further "skills" covered by the course, whose students will also be taught how to control their anger.

Answer back to the boss? More than your future career was worth - once.

OF course the premature death of George Best was a huge personal tragedy. Football also undoubtedly lost one of its most inspired - and inspiring - players. But the reaction to his final illness and death, with the lavish obituaries run three times - when he first became seriously ill last September, on the eve of his death and immediately afterwards, was wildly over the top. To match its scale and character, the funeral would have to be a state occasion.

We seem to have developed an urge to indulge in orgies of vicarious mourning over celebrities. The most recent example, with less justification than for George Best, was John Peel. For Peel, for all his contribution to rock music, did not make music himself. Only those who do deserve to be on the pinnacle to which Peel was elevated.

Meanwhile, a footballer from the past not mentioned in any of the comparisons I heard being drawn between George Best and earlier outstanding players was Middlesbrough's Wilf Mannion. Yet Mannion was at least the equal of Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney, whose names were often invoked. The other day, quite by chance, I happened to pass Mannion's grave in Eston cemetery. The headstone doesn't state that he was a footballer, let alone that he played for England.