KEY POINTS:
Sir Brian Lochore and I are of an age - there is less than three months between our birth dates in 1940. So it is not surprising that I read the report of his address to a Parents Inc breakfast last week with much nodding of my head.
It is not surprising, either, that the venerable rugby icon took a great deal of stick from letter writers and others, including at the weekend a windy diatribe by the opinionated young cricket scribbler Richard Boock.
Sir Brian told the 1000-strong gathering: "We are living in a PC world which is destroying us, where you actually can't put the hard word on people when they have digressed and committed bad blunders."
He is right. The dissembling, obfuscation and circumlocution of which political correctness consists has long meant that we can no longer tell it like it is, whatever it might be.
But I doubt that political correctness, which regular readers of this column know is the bete noire I belabour at every opportunity, is entirely to blame for the sort of things that Sir Brian was going crook about.
They are, I think, more of a generational thing. We oldies tend to forget that we were born and grew up in a different age, and that there is much that was believed and done in our day that is pretty much incomprehensible to anyone born after the mid-1960s.
Two things in particular seemed to bug those who were so stung by Sir Brian's words that they hastened to pen responses: one was leaving kids in cars; the other the discipline of smacking.
Yet those two actions were as common when I was a kid as were three meals a day at the kitchen table with my parents and brother, and having a story read to me by either mum or dad before I went to sleep.
On long journeys by car we were often left, albeit very briefly, in the car by ourselves outside a pub; and if no babysitter were available, then we sometimes bedded down in the car outside wherever our parents were socialising.
And we thought nothing of it, for we lived in a society far different from today's, in close-knit communities in which neighbourliness and care for one another were taken for granted.
Sir Brian grew up in a rural area, I in a small city. And we had nothing to fear. We had the run of the place and as long as we turned up for meals on time, our parents had no cause to worry about us.
There would have been sexual predators about in those days, and other sorts of evil-doers, but such was the cohesiveness of the community at large that such people had little opportunity, certainly in public, to perpetrate their perversions.
We would occasionally arrive home with broken arms or legs or collarbones, or with cuts and bruises, and were treated matter-of-factly by our parents, the local GP or the hospital outpatients' department without rancour or condemnation. These things were seen as par for the course of childhood.
So I know what Sir Brian was getting at when he urged fathers to let their children take risks, but to lay down rules and impose consequences if those rules are broken.
Which, I think, has less to do with PC than it has with the way society has evolved in the past 40-odd years. The moral fabric of the nation has endlessly unravelled.
Our sense of community responsibility has reached a new low; drug-taking is endemic, and crime has become more vicious and blatant. So it is quite natural that parents these days are far more protective of their kids than ever, some to the point of paranoia, for there are no longer caring, watchful communities to help to keep them safe.
On smacking, Sir Brian said: "Yes, I smacked my children, but never hit them. Yes, I smacked other people's children, but never hit them ... "
I was smacked by my parents and my teachers when I transgressed or placed myself in danger, and suffered no harm from it. I was hit only once by an adult, a nasty-natured primary schoolteacher, who took exception to something I said and belted me on the ear so hard it brought tears to my eyes.
So I know how big the difference is between a smack and a hit, yet the Boocks of this world don't seem able to get their heads around it.
However, the statement in the Herald's report that really made me laugh came from another contemporary of mine, Ian Grant, who founded Parents Inc, when he suggested that society was turning fathers into "male mothers", obsessed with safety instead of adventure.
I laughed only because if I hadn't, the truth of his observation would have made me cry.
