Grombles

Western societies are progressively waking up to prejudices deeply ingrained in our cultures. Gender (both self-selected and birth-allocated), skin colour, religion, nationality and age are all differentiators which traditionally our cultures used to define how we treat people. Today - at least amongst civilised and liberal-minded people such as they might exist - we celebrate diversity, and we try to treat all flavours of people as equal... which of course we are. But is there a classification which we still wittingly, or otherwise, use to define our behaviour towards people who adopt or are given that classification? Are we still prejudiced despite our new liberal nature? Are we prejudiced by a person's occupation ? I recently received a form I needed to complete before being accepted for household insurance cover. It's what they call a Statement of Fact. It includes a whole range of things you might expect like 'have I made any claims recently', 'does my proper...

I'm going to cry. No really. I'm going to cry. My iPhone won't sync the notes I write on it with Outlook. After hours of forums and fiddling, I've discovered that some spotty software developer at Apple has decided that notes written on an iPhone go into an email account (why??!), which some other spotty-faced developer at Google (and I have great sympathy with all acne sufferers, but god knew what he was doing afflicting these bastards) decided should be in my Gmail account (it's an email address, not a folder to keep stuff), and which some spotty-face at Microsoft decided wouldn't show up without crashing Outlook on my incredibly slow and totally knackered Dell, designed by.... some other spotty-faced nutter. I'm a graduate engineer from UCL (lord knows how) and regard myself as technically literate. I read New Scientist, BBC Focus (fantastic mag!), watch endless science and tech documentaries, and am a member of the Royal Institution. I founded a number...

My teenage kid, a bright, generous, and thoughtful lad, asked me yesterday what I and my school mates called thick kids at school. I offered words like 'twat', 'idiot', 'clot', 'prat' etc. But what he said next froze me to the core. "We call them Downs". I could not stay calm. "Do you know what a Downs person is? How dare you show disrespect to people, especially children with disabilities. Can't you see how hurtful this would be to parents and siblings of Downs sufferers? How would you feel if you heard it being used as an insult if your own brother was a Downs child?"... and so on. But instead of my normally respectful intelligent son apologising and mumbling that he wasn't thinking and would never do it again, he angrily defended his attitude and those of 'his generation'. "You live in the past. Things are different today" - probably much like I would have argued with my own parents. Is he right? Or have w...