There has been quite a furore (and rightly so) in the last couple of weeks about the mindless, senseless felling of the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall. Like so many others I find myself in utter shock that someone could commit such a perverse and destructive act on a thing of natural beauty like that beloved and iconic tree.

To think that someone skulked out in the middle of the night with malice aforethought to cut down a tree that not only outlives all of us, and many generations before, but also has such a fond place in the national consciousness, is one that troubles me deeply.

You see, to me, it’s not just the cutting down of that wonderful old behemoth of the North that bothers me but something that goes much deeper. To me, the felling of that beautiful sycamore is just another example of gross dysfunction in the ever-growing depraved and sick society that we live in in the UK. A society that is increasingly without morals.

This is not just about a tree. It’s about mankind in general.

One cannot switch on the news of an evening without hearing of a shooting or stabbing somewhere in the UK. My own family was robbed last year of a dear and much-loved relative at the point of a knife, wielded by a deranged and malevolent woman who is thankfully behind bars now.

Murder is nothing new of course, it’s been around for millennia, but here we are living in a so-called civilised and progressive age and yet there are twelve-year-old boys being arrested on an almost daily basis for stabbing someone to death or running them over in a car.

I’m trying, I really am, but for the life of me I just can’t think of a single news story from my childhood that spoke of gangs of children going around the streets of Britain brandishing machetes with every intention of using them.

It’s like we’ve not advanced at all from the era of Dickens when cut-throats and foot-pads roamed the streets of London and all our major cities looking for any opportunity to kill in cold blood for the small gain of some poor sod’s purse or pocket watch. Only these days they’re after your bank card and smartphone.

The worst criminals aren’t on the streets though.

Every politician in the House of Commons, yes every stinking one of them, would put themselves before the good of this country without a qualm. Parliament is as corrupt as the rat ridden sewers that run beneath it and yet for thirteen years now the British people have sat back and listened to a continued barrage of lies spewed from the mouths of a government that isn’t fit for purpose yet keeps getting in every time there is a general election as the sheep-like majority of the populace vote them in to office.

And don’t complain about Sunak and Co if you voted them in in the first place! There were other choices you know!

And if those that run the country are so deceitful and full of self-serving villainy then you can hardly expect any criminally minded citizen to behave any different, can you? What kind of example is being set to the rest of us? Kids on the street hear about their prime ministers and other politicians breaking the law so why shouldn’t they?

There was a time when people entered into politics to try and make a difference, whatever side of the political fence they sat on. Now people enter into politics to make money. Pure and simple. Liz Truss was no sooner elected leader of the Tories when suddenly her autobiography came out to coincide with it. How about getting on and sorting out the hopeless mess your lot made sweetheart before you start telling us how great you are and raking in the profits.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, you and Kwarteng nearly sank the economy and jumped ship after 49 days, didn’t you?

But enough about her. It’s not just the current government though, is it? This country has been slowly rotting away from the inside out since the Second World War. It’s not a land fit for heroes. They’ve made it a land fit for cockroaches, criminals and chancers.

I’m glad I grew up when I did; in the 1970s. It wasn’t great but it was better than now. I’d hate to be a teenager at school now. And I couldn’t for the life of me be a teacher at any cost. I worked in a school twenty years ago as a teaching assistant and things I saw back then were enough to make you want to go home, sit in a darkened room and rock back and forth gibbering quietly to yourself in the belief that we’re not going to make it as a species.

It was bad enough then, now you begin to wonder if teachers should be armed in the same way that the police are. I seriously think they should. If some stinking, unwashed, greasy-ring-pieced, hoodie-wearing, coward rat bag with a knife thought for one minute that Sir or Miss had a taser in their pocket and weren’t afraid to use it then they might think twice about waving that blade about.

Extreme perhaps?

Well yeah, perhaps it is, but so what? Having an acned scrote of a 14-year-old push a carving knife between your ribs just for doing your job is pretty extreme too. Why shouldn’t teachers defend themselves?

I’m not one of those old farts who chants on about, “bringing back the cane”; those days are gone and can’t come back. But there has to be some kind of deterrent or anarchy reigns supreme and it’s the hardworking teachers who are bearing the brunt.

They took God out of the schools and the devil walked right in and took his place. Where there used to be a couple of hymns in assembly you now have condom machines in the boys toilets. You can’t say the Lord’s Prayer, hell no, but hey, look on the bright side, you can shag Stacey from 4C without getting her up the duff!

That’s progress for you folks!

The Royal Family is another institution that is hardly worth venerating. Three out of four of Queen Elizabeth’s children’s marriages ended in ugly divorce. Charles’s divorce from Diana was particularly acrimonious and publicly messy and now he’s sitting on the throne with the pickled-walnut-faced current Mrs Windsor next to him who he destroyed his first marriage for. Hardly a great example for the sanctity of marriage and traditional family values is he?

If the future king can screw around, why can’t the rest of us?

And we are (well, not personally). The divorce rate in the UK is currently about 42%. That’s not far off half. And the vast majority of them are caused by spousal infidelity. People just can’t seem to keep it in their pants these days, or so it seems, and then wonder why their kids go off the rails and start turning to promiscuity, drugs and crime. Erm, maybe the lack of a solid family unit might have something to do with it.

Sinead O’Connor once sang a song called Black Boys on Mopeds based on a true story about how the police chased two black youths who had stolen some mopeds and it ended in disaster with the two youths being killed in the chase. It’s a nice sentiment and a great song, and I do feel sorry that Sinead is no longer with us, but you have to ask the question, if they hadn’t stolen the mopeds in the first place would they still be alive today? I like to think so. And I’m not specifically blaming the two lads for what happened. They were victims of a rotten and twisted society that has let them and every other teenager down for years and years.

You often hear the teenage rallying cry of, “There’s nothing to do around here!” Well, if people brought their kids up right that wouldn’t be such an issue. There are actually plenty of things for young people to do. They’re just not encouraged to do it by their lazy, lack-witted, Kopparberg-sodden parents and so turning to petty or even serious crime is their only way to relieve the boredom.

And no, before you start, I’m not tarring all teenagers and parents with the same brush. There are some great kids out there from great families who are the hope for the future. But you’ve got to admit that teenage crime, particularly violent crime, is on an alarmingly rapid increase.

Even entertainment has become the playground of the ignorant, the arrogant and the downright crass. Cruelty for fun seems to be the watchword where entertainment is concerned these days. Let’s be as offensive as we possibly can. That’s the mantra of modern TV comedians.

All those absolute bollocks panel shows where talentless piss ants, who aren’t fit to tie Eric Morecambe’s shoelaces, sit and make crude and grossly offensive jokes about anyone and anything without fear of rebuttal is now the norm for comedy. There was a time when the F word was shocking and yet now is as common as the word “The” in the English language. We all say it but does it have to be bandied about with such abandon?

Television becomes more and more voyeuristic by the day. It started with Big Brother and all the nobody housemates getting their kit off for their fifteen minutes of fame and now there’s an absolute slew of reality shite broadcast night after night with nothing deeper than titillation at the core. Bloody hell! If you’ve seen one bikini clad, pneumatic-breasted, pouting, bottle blonde with micro-bladed eyebrows poncing around on a beach you’ve seen them all!

Give us something a bit more high-brow please.

There’s no decent role models for kids. Lads have got overpaid and under-performing cock-happy footballers and rappers who go on about ho’s and slapping their bitches up, to look up to and girls have got the likes of Katie Price and Madonna; or what bits of them are still their own. It’s either that or some bunch of naff, suntanned, tooth-whitened so called “celebs” from Essex or somewhere trying to be dramatic and convince us all they have meaningful lives when in reality they’re about as vacuous as a blank sheet of A4 but only fractionally as interesting. Hardly inspiring the next generation is it?

And will people please stop calling them “celebs!”

A celebrity by definition is someone who is celebrated. Who celebrates that lot?

And when I was a kid, if someone daubed spray paint all over someone else’s property it was deemed as graffiti and classed as vandalism. These days it’s called “street art” and the perpetrators are given a government grant to do some more and woe betide if you dare to speak against it; ye rattling olde worlde bigot ye!

I’m not totally against graffiti though. There used to be a lovely big picture of an aerosol sprayed cock and balls on the railway bridge near us and then the council went and painted over it. Bastards! They just don’t understand youth culture.

I’m being sarcastic, I hope it showed.

Another thing that was different when I was a kid was cannabis. At one time you had to hide away like some kind of hideous, flesh-tortured leper if you wanted to smoke cannabis for fear of getting your collar felt. You had to stay indoors to smoke it basically. Now you can’t walk into town without the whiff of the stuff up your nostrils. It’s everywhere. And I mean everywhere!

I’ve had so many cars pass me by when I’ve been walking through an urban area with a trail of the stuff billowing out of the window. That means that the driver is stoned! He’s not in full control of his vehicle and is therefore posing a serious and dangerous threat to other road users.

Listen, smoke the stuff to your heart’s content if that’s what you want to do. I agree that it should be legalised. It’s by and large harmless and people under its effect are generally non-violent and some people find genuine pain relief from it. I just don’t want any involvement myself. I don’t want to smell it, taste it or have you kill me because you’re off your tits on it behind the wheel.

Napoleon called Britain a nation of shopkeepers. He may have been right at the time but now we’re a nation of dope smokers.

And they’ve done something to the smell of it as well. Cannabis used to be quite a pleasant sort of sweet-smelling thing. Now it smells like half rotted leaf matter mixed with donkey excrement and public transport seating. It’s vile. Stomach churningly vile.

They can’t leave anything alone can they?

And it’s almost as if you are in some way not “cool” if, like me, you don’t smoke the bloody stuff. But then again, I never have been cool. Not really. But I’m happy to be a bumbling, beardy, old prog rocker come folkie who gets his kicks from listening to Jethro Tull and Steeleye Span with a nice glass of red wine in my hand. You see, not cool at all.

Cannabis of course is the mere very tippy, trippy top of the drugs iceberg. Class A drugs are now so endemic on our streets that a bit of weed is neither here nor there really and nobody seems to mind it anymore. Hard drugs, however, are a massive, potentially unsolvable problem that cause abject misery to so many and the whole country is rife with them.

And the boys in blue don’t give a toss about it either. Mind you, they don’t give a toss about anything much these days except hate speech. I’m strongly opposed to hate speech myself but when three coppers turn up at someone’s home to arrest them in handcuffs for reposting a mean tweet when there are smackheads driving around out there above and beyond the speed limit without a care in the world and young men (and women) sticking knives in one another, reeks of a wrong sense of priority to me.

And why would you trust the police?

Every week there’s a news story about an officer being arrested/charged/imprisoned for rape or extortion or perverting the course of justice. Hardly builds public confidence in the forces of the law, does it? But then, who else are you going to call when your BMW gets nicked off your driveway by some wasted 16-year-old and his mates? There is nobody else.

I’m not even scratching the surface with this. The country is in a mess that would take at least a century to get out of. You can’t go anywhere in the countryside anymore without seeing litter or fly-tipping because the dirty bastards who do it are so disgustingly lazy and self-centred.

And that, my dear reader, brings me to the very crux of the problem.

We have become a society of self-centred, high-minded, over-opinionated, self-righteous pricks who do not care what effect their own words or actions have on others.

We are not living in the age of reason, we are living in the age of, “I couldn’t give a fuck!”

And that is the bare truth of the matter. That is so many people’s attitude today. The “I don’t care” culture that now permeates our society regardless of class, creed or status. Nobody cares about anything much any more unless it inconveniences them in some way.

We should bloody well care. We should care about what we say and do. We should care about how we are perceived by others. We should care about the feelings and wellbeing of our fellow man. We should, as Jesus Christ said, love our neighbours.

And it is that wholly abhorrent attitude of not caring that caused that fine old tree to be brutally slain.

Who ever did it did it out of arrogance and the probability that they just didn’t care. They assumed that they’d get away with it and be some sort of modern Robin Hood style anti-hero and that there would be a raft of people guffawing like twats in bars (you can’t call them pubs anymore because they’re not) the length and breadth of the country about their paltry and mean-spirited deed.

And the sad truth is they’re right.

For every person lamenting the passing of the Sycamore Gap tree there is another one making some ham-fisted gag about it. Petty and grossly unfunny memes making mockery of the tree are appearing online even as I type this. That’s how sick our nation has become. We just don’t care anymore. Everything has to be turned into a crude and cruel joke and then shrugged off with a “so what” attitude.

I’ll finish here, but I’ll end by saying that I personally hope that whoever hacked that tree down slips with the chainsaw, the next time they use it, and cut their own balls off.

They’ll “give a fuck” then!

I need to go and lie down on the couch now with a cup of chamomile tea and a couple of paracetamol and try to remind myself that there is still some good in this world, for it is thankfully true that there is. We just need to see a lot more of it.

Rant over.