SEEING a gang of stripey-jumpered, hoodied future cell-fillers damage athletics equipment at Bolton Harriers before scaling a couple of walls and fences to steal a few minutes' free football at Premier Fives got me thinking.

Kids aren't what they used to be.

My daughter asked why I didn't tell the social not-rights to stop swinging on the frame of the throw cage which had lost their expensive green nets to an earlier attack of vandalism.


What's the point? Give them attention and they do it all the more.

For what other reason than to satisfy the need for attention did the Bradley Fold branch of the Special Needs Squad line the side of the road to throw stones at passing cars, including mine, a few months back?

When I approached them (I wouldn't recommend it) the eyes of these eight to 15-year-olds were as dead as their prospects, their brain-to-mouth co-ordination insufficient to achieve communication.

When I rang the police to get my crime number, the group turned like wildebeest and wandered off who knows, or cares, where.

The government wants kids to swear allegiance to their country when they leave school. That's a laugh.

Wherever I turn, kids seem to have lost their respect for authority.

Adults are attacked for protecting their property, teachers are complaining to their unions about being bullied by pupils, children under the age of eight have been admitted to accident and emergency units for alcohol-related problems 95 times in the last 12 months and at a primary school football match I watched on Monday one youngster told his mother to shut up and called her a muppet.

There have always been bad kids, the difference is there is now a greater disregard for rules.

Where they used to know there was a difference between right and wrong, now the choice appears to be between wrong and wronger in their blurred anti-social existence.