HAVING made the case in my main article for seeing the positives instead of the negatives, I have to admit that this is not always easy in a town where idiots daub Fred Dibnah’s statue with white paint, arsonists cause mayhem and vandals make regular attacks on schools.

But I have made the same point before.

This sort of activity is not new. There are mature, sensible adults in Bolton — middle-aged and elderly — who probably prefer to forget that they and their mates wrecked and burned things in their teenage years.

They did not admit it then and they are unlikely to do so now.

I doubt whether there has ever been a golden age when young people were not, in the language of today, “challenging”.

A 50-year-old item from our archives the other day reported that the chief constable of Bolton was concerned that a spring cosh, a bicycle chain and a sharply-pointed piece of metal had been taken from local youths.

The negative is that people like them were once stupid and anti-social, the positive is that most of them probably went on to become better citizens. We have to hope that most of today’s trouble-makers do the same.