I don't know what they called now but it used to be Tinkers or Travellers. The Bleeding Hearts say they get a hard time. Most, I'm sure, are good and decent people. But there are some who want a lifestyle which allows them to vanish overnight. Years ago such a band of such characters set up camp on the common land between two villages in the English Midlands. Their packs of savage dogs made it impossible to use the public right of way linking the two villages. This mob made their living from tarmacking driveways. I heard they showed up at homes of the vulnerable, elderly, stupid and the just plain greedy claiming to have some Tarmac left over from a construction job going on nearby. So, for cash in hand they could lay a new driveway for a bargain price. I wouldn't be surprised if the new driveway proved to be paper thin and cracked open within a month. But that wasn't the worst of what they did. Boiling up bitumen for the Tarmac creates a highly toxic cancer inducing thick tarry sludge. When these people vanished they left the stream between the two villages clogged with a toxic residue.

Last weekend I stumbled across an event called Yego. It was word play on the fact that the international airport designation for Edmonton, Canada, is YEG, and the children's toy Lego. Now, I remember when Lego bricks came in four or five sizes. What kids did with their margarine tub, or whatever, full of bricks was only limited by their imagination and ingenuity. So, it was a shock to see how many of the exhibits depended on specially molded pieces. I can see why the folk who make Lego would want to sell sets that make a specific item, like a space station or a racing car. In the old days when a kid had a margarine tub full of bricks the world was their oyster and they stopped buying anymore Lego. Still, it's a shame that kids these days expect Lego to do a lot of work for them.

Many years ago I was finishing off a beer in a pub in Edmonton after my mates had headed off to somewhere I had no interest in going to when a couple of guys asked me if the table was taken. I said I was leaving and they were welcome to it. This was in Edmonton, Canada. The first guys were joined by more and it became apparent I was sharing a table with a number of members of the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos (these days rebranded as the Elks). At first I was perturbed there were no black guys there because I knew the team had a number on the roster. The CFL teams have a large number of American players who can't get a game in their own country in the National Football League. But then I realised that it wasn't black guys the players at the table didn't want to drink with, it was failed American Footballers. Later in Regina, Saskatchewan, the local CFL team, the Roughriders, was idolised and the American exiles never ceased to praise the city during their public appearances. But the praise always sounded insincere to me and I thought it was scripted by team management. I mentioned this belief to my boss in the pub and was told that as I wasn't from Regina I had no right to an opinion. But that season the Roughriders won the Grey Cup, the only CFL competition that counts, and almost all the Americans cashed in the kudos earned to join NFL teams. So much for their professed love of Regina and what a fantastic place to live and work it was. And all those scripted assurances that the Canadian rules game was far superior to the NFL version.

I once won Employee of the Year. It was to a surprisingly extent simply a lucky draw. To qualify for the draw a person had to do something reckoned to be above and beyond what they drew their pay packet for doing. Anyway, the point is that the winner helped judge who might qualify for the following year's draw. I joined pretty senior management on judging committee. But I found that the people being nominated hadn't done anything more than their job. I wasn't invited to any subsequent judging committee meetings. Every day on the radio I hear hosts lavishing exhaustive thanks journalists for their contributions. Which would be OK if the journalists were being paid for those contributions.

The younger generation, and even the generation that follows it, is often dismissed as soft and not half the men their fathers were. British Second World War commanders often lamented that their troops were nothing like as tough as the men they had led as junior officers during the First World War. Perhaps what they really meant was the men were less docile and deferential. Most of the guys in the frontline had been brought up at the hard edge of The Depression and not a few had lost their fathers in the First War. They were just as tough but possibly a bit cannier than their fathers. For about a decade the youngsters joining the 21st Century British Army's infantry battalions went in knowing they would almost certainly see action - either Iraq or Afghanistan. The almost certainty of combat was not true for the vast majority of men who joined up during the Cold War. Few would say the fresh generations failed to rise to the challenge - despite stories that they had to do their basic instruction wearing training shoes because their feet were too soft for boots.