From teapots to rare meat, my Britain is becoming a lost country

There was a letter to the Daily Telegraph last weekend which depressed me more than anything I’ve read in ages. It reported the visit by a social worker to an elderly woman who made her a cup of tea. The young social worker was shocked by what she saw. Not only did this bewildered old woman insist on using leaves rather than a bag but she first poured some hot water into the pot, swirled it round, then wasted it by putting it straight down the sink. Here, clearly, was evidence that grandma was incapable of looking after herself and should be put into care immediately.

This put me in mind of another experience I had recently. I was having dinner with a group of friends in an upmarket London pub and we all wanted our burgers cooked medium rare. ‘They won’t allow it,’ said a local friend in the know. ‘We’re under Westminster Council jurisdiction, here.’ Sure enough, when the time to order came we had to beg and plead with the manager for our burgers not be overcooked, as local health laws now require.

It also reminded me of my recent adventures with my dentist, a clearly bright, well-spoken girl in her twenties of, I’m guessing, Pakistani extraction. She obviously knows all her stuff but I can’t stand her. The problem is that she has the most appalling dental-chair-side manner. She’s officious, patronising, fully bought-into the NHS programme, whereby every patient is a statistic rather than a real person. It seems never to have occurred to her that the way you address an educated, middle-aged country gent might need to be slightly different from the way, say, you speak to a porcine 15-year-old chav.

Also, she gives off these truly horrible politically correct vibes. Some of the most interesting and enjoyable conversations of my life are the ones I have with people of different races and cultures about where they come from and how the world looks from their perspective.