EVERY street used to have a busybody. The sort of woman - it was invariably a woman - who knew everyone's business, who knew who was sleeping with whom, who hadn't paid the rent, which teenage girls were pregnant, and even who the father was.

And if she spotted you up to no good, you can be sure that your mum would know about it before you even got home.

She was, frankly, a pain. Constantly peeping from behind curtains, "accidentally" bumping into you in the shop, asking questions, indirectly or bold as brass, as direct as you like.

The busybody was a one-woman Neighbourhood Watch. No burglar, ne'er-do-well or stranger could come into her little world without her knowing about it. She'd challenge them too.

She'd make calls to the police about the most minor infringements of byelaws. She'd leave notes on the windscreens of cars. She'd tell daft lads off for making too much noise, tell girls off for hanging round with the lads. If you saw her in the street, you'd dodge back into your house until she'd gone.

Which is why we all swore we would never be like her. We keep ourselves to ourselves. What our neighbours get up to is their business not ours. Bitter experience has taught us that it's not a good idea to challenge other people's children.

Live and let live, we say. It's nothing to do with us.

Which is why small children get beaten to death by their mum's boyfriends, why babies die of neglect and why, in one week, we heard about two middleaged women whose bodies had lain undiscovered, unnoticed, unreported in their homes, one for two years, the other for three. That's where minding our own business has got us.

And who's to say that one day it might not happen to you or me? Everyone else will be so busy keeping themselves to themselves that we could easily lie alone and neglected and dying long before we are noticed.

The busybody was always a social pariah. Too late we realised she was really a lifesaver.

WELLINGTON College, a leading public school, is to give its privileged pupils lessons in how to be happy.

Well that's killed it, hasn't it?

Just imagine. "Double maths, Latin and then - oh no - more blessed happiness."

Nothing like making things compulsory for them to be an immediate turn-off.

And what will the pupils do for happiness homework? Practise smiling? Eat chocolate?

No doubt, the proposed course is much more sensible and wide-reaching. But as for achieving happiness, I always thought that came as a bonus while you were concentrating on something else.

Double maths, for instance.

AMERICAN tourists are being given lessons in good manners. Businesses and the US State Department are so worried about the American image overseas that they've issued guidelines. These include advice such as speaking more quietly, dressing more appropriately and not boasting about how wonderful America is.

Actually - apart from their huge bodies overflowing their technicolor shorts - the only fault with most Americans abroad is their noisy over enthusiasm.

Basically, they are wonderfully polite and eager to learn, even when we're ripping them off and they're paying about three times what they'd pay at home for far fewer facilities.

Meanwhile, the English abroad are easily identifiable. All too often, they are the ones with the loud voices, the foul language, the drunken behaviour, and the complete and utter disregard for local customs, attitudes and people. And that's even before we start on the football fans.

Before we laugh at the Americans , as a nation we could do well to tidy up our own act and learn a few manners of our own.

Are the days of will reading over?

LATEST developments in Coronation Street have set me thinking - especially where the family gathered to hear the reading of Mike Baldwin's will. As they always do in soap operas.

Now I have dealt with a number of deaths, have been an executor in my time, but I have never ever been to a reading of a will. Either we've already had a copy, tucked into the back of the family Bible or kitchen drawer, or have just collected one from the solicitor or bank, or wherever it was for safe keeping.

I have never known any occasion where the whole family has gathered in a solicitor's office to be told the 'great surprise'.

It is a wonderful dramatic device, but has it ever happened? Or was it merely invented by the great Victorian novelists and lifted wholesale into modern soap operas?

Fine example of a stiff upper lip HAPPY Birthday to the Queen, 80 this week and still out riding regularly. She deserves our congratulations, if only for keeping fit and keeping going.

In the spate of birthday celebrations there has, of course, been plenty of carping and criticism. Often mentioned is her lack of public emotion.

But that's wonderful. Far from a fault, it's one of her major attributes.

It's clear, form the few glimpses we've seen of her on private occasions, that she can be as emotional as the rest of us. But gosh, isn't it a relief that she doesn't do it in public.

Can you imagine her on peak time television, fluttering her eyelashes and telling all?

It doesn't bear thinking about, does it?

Every day we are surrounded by actors, celebrities, nonentities, spilling out their messy emotional lives for the rest of us to wallow in. Celebrations are way over the top and so is the suffering. The stiff upper lip has melted into tears and sniffles. Daytime television is the modern equivalent of Bedlam, with everything from Trisha and Jerry Springer to the Big Brother housemates, letting it all hang out for our entertainment.

Then there is the fashion for books depicting childhood abuse in intimate and graphic detail. They want us to share their pain.

Well frankly, I don't want to. Definitely too much information.

There is a lot to be said for restraint and reticence, for keeping feelings to oneself and getting on with life without inflicting it all on the rest of us. It is an art which the Queen has mastered to perfection.

Let's hope she'll set us a good example for many more years yet.

BACKCHAT Dear Sharon, WHEN I left to go to college in the early 1970s and moved into a flat in my second year, I soon learnt how to change a plug, cook, clean and unblock the loo. It was a steep learning curve.

A few years later when my husband and I bought our first home, my parents were brilliant and gave us a lot of help, but they didn't do everything for us.

Instead, they taught us how to do it ourselves. I always remember my mum wallpapering a room, letting me help her. When it came to the next one she said: "Now you do it, and I'll be the assistant."

It's the way we brought up our own children and I am pleased to say that both of them are now quite capable of looking after themselves and doing odd jobs round the house. Now, so many of their contemporaries are still living at home in their 20s and have no incentive to learn to cope.

Mum and dad still do it for them.

Joyce Andrews, Darlington Dear Sharon, MAYBE the answer with young drivers is to have an intermediate stage so that once they've passed the test they then have to clock up so many hours with an approved instructor before they can be allowed out alone. They would have to have a log book and it would be a bit like learning to fly solo.

It should also include a wide variety of roads, particularly motorways and night driving.

It would be more expensive, but if it could help save young lives it must be worth it.

D Jameson, Darlington.