D is for discipline

WANT to see standards in state schools soaring?

Easy. Just teach your children to behave. A new survey for a teachers' union has revealed that even in good schools in pleasant areas, children can be pretty horrible. Teachers are subjected to a constant barrage of abuse, from low level mutterings to full scale physical assault.

No wonder so many of them want to jack it all in and become train drivers - especially when added to the burden of all the pointless paperwork they have to do now.

Children have always been capable of being pretty poisonous - just think of Tom Brown's schooldays - but in previous generations were well caged in and controlled. And not just by the threat of physical punishment.

Schools were smaller. Much easier to deal with one bad boy in a year of 30, than ten in a year of 300. Teachers knew our parents, who were generally on the side of teachers rather than children.

Maybe, too, we saw education as a great route to a happy and successful life.

When celebrities can earn millions just for doing. . . well, not very much really, is it any wonder that children don't see the point?

In the meantime, teachers are still struggling to educate the monsters - and those keen kids who don't stand a chance in the general mayhem. The latest trick is to wind teachers up until they lose it completely (and come on, didn't we used to try that one too? ) and then film them on mobile phones.

All the time spent in crowd control in the classroom is time less spent on teaching. So if you can persuade your children to sit down, be quiet and pay attention, they might actually learn something.

At the very least, teachers would have more time for the paperwork.

SHOPPING in Ikea is like entering the third circle of hell, only not as much fun. On Thursday, having allowed myself to be shunted along their one-way system and then into the bleak warehouse, I failed utterly to find a "co-worker" and ended up lugging a six foot bookcase off the shelf myself - and dropping it on my toes - and abandoning it at the exit while I went to fetch my car and tried to find a space.

From there, feeling cross and frazzled, I went to the nearby Asda superstore.

Theoretically you could walk between the two stores but I reckon 99 per cent of people go by car. Both stores are built on a giant scale with giant car parks and hordes of staff and customers. All of which will send you into a deep depression, mild panic or absolute fury. Either way, it was bliss to get away from there.

The next day, in stark contrast, I was shopping in Northallerton, where I managed to park in the high street, then strolled to the butcher who had time to slice some steak just as I wanted it, where the lady in Betty's took time to wrap my purchases in a box, carefully tied up, and to Lewis and Cooper , where I sampled the olives and cheese before making my selection and wandering out again into the high street.

Not only were all the people in the shops friendly and helpful, but the whole shopping experience was different - largely because it was still on a human scale.

But high streets - even splendid High streets like Northallerton's - are facing an uphill battle. If we don't use them - and small shops and markets - they will gradually vanish. All we will be left with will be huge out-of-town shopping malls, where customers get swallowed up at one end and spat out at the other.

And not even a cheap book case is worth that.

CHARLES and Camilla celebrated their first anniversary by wearing matching kilts to church.

Sweet or what?

I suppose it's the royal equivalent of wearing those his 'n' hers matching hand knitted sweaters. Definitely a sign of middle-aged devotion.

UNDER 30s are apparently hopeless at changing a plug. So? When their parents were young, every electrical appliance you bought came trailing an unconnected wire. You had to put a plug on before you could use it, so knowing how to do so was pretty vital. Now everything comes with a plug already fixed and I cannot remember when I last had to wire up a plug.

As a modern skill, it's pretty irrelevant. I don't suppose many under 30s can milk a cow by hand or butcher a brontosaurus. The world has moved on.

And before the oldies start feeling too superior, remember it's the over 50s who have most trouble with practical tasks such as setting the video or using a mobile - both of which are much more relevant to modern life than changing a wretched plug.

I'M sad to hear of the death of Joy Beaver of Leyburn who worked as a dry stone waller, not an obvious career for a woman, but one she enjoyed and did well. Some years ago I spent a glorious day with her high on a hillside in Wensleydale, watching admiringly as she lugged huge stones around - she was only little - and fitted them into a strong and sturdy wall, that not only did the job, but which looked good too.

Dry stone walling was, she said, her way of doing something artistic and the walls she made with such care were certainly beautiful as well as practical.

She died too young, only in her fifties, but it is some consolation that scattered throughout the Dales, and in Wensleydale in particular, the walls she made will go on for a century or more, part of the fabric of the dale and much admired. As memorials go, it's hard to beat.

FIRST it was Apple, now it's Moses. . .Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin are said to have named their new baby son after the lyrics of one of his band Coldplay's songs.

Makes you wonder what they will call any future babies And you thought X & Y was just the name of a Coldplay album.

HOORAY! I won on the National. A whole £17, riches beyond the dreams of avarice. However, Senior Son placed the bet for me and collected my winnings just before a night out with his brother in Leeds. What chance do you think of my seeing that money, or all of it anyway?

Yes, that's what I thought too.