I have been having a discussion with a friend about the use of the word mankind. She claims that it makes women “invisible” and should be abandoned in favour of humankind or humanity – or, if not abandoned, used only to refer to men.

This makes me uneasy. Mankind means humanity and not people of the male persuasion. It is a useful word that has the virtue of being unambiguous and inclusive of every being that comes under the heading human. Humanity can mean compassion, and human race is inaccurate, because mankind is not a race but a species.

Changing the use of language to reflect a political position has a bad history. We’ve all read 1984. Changing the language to pander to people who are over-sensitive is equally disturbing – if not another version of the same thing. If women feel disempowered or invisible, then it’s nothing to do with language: it’s to do with relationships and attitudes. Bullying is bullying, whatever the gender.

I myself have never seen an invisible woman. I hope that’s not a dismissive thing to say. All the women I know are very visible indeed, and I rejoice that this is so. Almost everything I can do, a woman can do, both legally and practically, though not all of them can do it as well. Some can do it better, and most of them can do it better than most men could, but that’s another story. It’s also a wild generalisation, but it’s not offensive to women, I hope. Needless to say, all women can do things I can’t.

I once wrote a piece extolling the virtues of the female approach – and was castigated by a woman for being patronising. So I know I can’t win.

But the fact is that if you, as a woman, have been made to feel small or powerless by a man, you are likely to see that happening everywhere, and the three letters m-a-n are as a red rag to a bull, or in this case a heifer. But in English man has a dual meaning, like many, many other words. It may mean an adult male, or it may mean a member of the human race, or the human race as a whole. In mankind it has no gender reference at all.

This is not really a difficult concept to grasp. But if you look at other languages, it makes things even clearer. In French, mankind translates as humanité, whereas an adult male is homme. In German, mankind translates as Menschheit, whereas the German for a male adult is Mann. Interestingly in German the word man is equivalent to (though wider used than) the English one (as in Royal Family). Does this intimidate German women? And do they get annoyed that the word Mädchen, meaning girl, is in fact a neuter noun? Perhaps they do.

It just so happens that in English, the letters m-a-n have different meanings, like the letters s-e-t and many others. When it comes down to it, if you object to mankind, you might as well object to mandarins, manatees and Manchester United.

You could even argue that with the word man having a dual meaning, adult English males might feel aggrieved that they have no distinct word referring to them, whereas women have. There used to be a distinct word for man – the Old English wer – but there isn’t now.

The experience of my friend is that “male language feels alienating and dismissive, that men are thought of as more important”. I personally don’t know what male language is. Language is available to anyone. The use of words like man, or mankind, as descriptive terms is neutral.

It is quite wrong that women – any woman – should feel alienated or dismissed as of no importance. Obviously women are of equal value to men: any other position is absurd. I personally prefer them, but that is a question of taste.

I am sorry my friend has had the experience she has, but I don’t think changing the meaning or use of words that are simply descriptive and, in fact, inclusive, can possibly help her, or her cause. It might even alienate people who would be on her side. If there is a side.

Should I abandon all this logic, though, and simply not use the word mankind, so that she feels better? Well, I would like her to feel better. So it all comes down to this question: what is more important, language or feelings?

Tricky. Leonard Cohen says: “I don’t trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.” Does language come and go too? And if it does, what can we rely on to express ourselves accurately?

Bidding for money wastes more time and energy than almost any other activity.

I have no figures to back that up, but if you wanted to set up a project to unearth such statistics, you could probably bid for Lottery money to fund it. It would be a waste of time and energy, but that’s the way the world goes round.

Not literally, of course, unless you believe that the time and effort expended in bidding is somehow channelled into reinforcing gravity – and that is so unlikely that even the European Union would find it hard to justify.

But say you have lots of time and energy, and you would like to set up a project to benefit the community. Say, further, that your project involves working with children or vulnerable adults. Quite reasonably, you would like about £5000 to pay for it. It’s not much, and it’s available in a fund somewhere. Unfortunately the only way you can proceed is to bid for the money.

If you go ahead in your normal headstrong way you will receive a mere 15-page application form and 21 pages of guidance. And this is not fun reading. It is serious stuff. Oh yes. The sort of thing that saps most people’s will to live. The sort of thing that stops you working with children and vulnerable adults altogether.

It is not just a question of filling in the form, though that is debilitating enough. Before making your request for funding you need to “have safeguarding policies in place that are appropriate to your organisation’s work” – policies that have to be reviewed “at least every year”.

You must also “complete a rigorous recruitment and selection process for staff and volunteers … including checking criminal records and taking up references”. Criminal record checks, which I think I am safe in saying are totally unfit for purpose, unless the purpose is extracting money from innocent people, must be renewed “at least every three years”.

In addition, and among other things, you must “provide child protection and health and safety training or guidance for staff and volunteers”.

So in addition to your creative and exciting project, you now have to write tedious safeguarding policies and review them, introduce a rigorous bureaucratic process involving references and CRB checks, and provide crippling health and safety training and guidance – oh, and a risk assessment. Did I mention that?

All that is all on one page of the 15-page form which, happily, is quite good for making paper aeroplanes, so all is not lost. You could give them to children or vulnerable adults. As long as you have safeguarding policies in place.

Julian Fellowes, writer of the ITV drama series Downton Abbey, has apparently become dispirited by the amount of criticism he has received. This ranges from anachronisms (yellow lines and TV aerials) and plagiarism (sugar mistaken for salt; flower show contretemps) to historical inaccuracies and “cosiness”.

He attributes these criticisms to “permanent negative nitpicking from the Left”, though as they stem mainly from Daily Telegraph readers, this seems a strange approach to take. Telegraph readers are notoriously obsessed with wearing the correct clothes and pronouncing words as they were pronounced 50 years ago, and one can imagine them seizing with glee on anything that clashes with their particular view of the world. After all Downton Abbey is set in the early 20th century, and many Telegraph readers are authorities on this era, because they still live in it.

What Mr Fellowes may be referring to is the way other sections of the media, which are certainly tilting towards the negative left if not toppling over in that direction, have picked up the anti-Downton baton and run with it enthusiastically.

Let me come out into the open. I do not know Mr Fellowes personally, but I enjoy Downton Abbey very much and am delighted that a new series has been commissioned. I am also a Daily Telegraph reader. Many of my views are left-wing. Some are not.

I wonder what sort of viewer watches a drama in order to spot historical inaccuracies and anachronisms. I further ponder on what kind of literate person is not aware that there are no new plots, just reworking of old ones. As a writer who reads a lot, I know that I use ideas, plots and words that have been used before and lodged, often unknowingly, in my brain. Every writer does.

The real question is whether Mr Fellowes has produced a worthwhile drama, and it seems to me that he has succeeded brilliantly, with the help of some top-class casting and acting. One of his most striking achievements, not common in much drama, is to portray goodness as though it is an attractive quality.

Perhaps this is the real problem. There are those who do not like landed gentry to have good qualities and to treat their servants well. I am sure there are many who do not like the idea of servants at all, especially servants who are good at what they do and happy to do it.

But the vital question is not who you are; it is how you react. Service is a dignified calling, whether it is in a country house, a restaurant or a department store. The so-called status of a job is a red herring. What matters is whether we do a job well. Mr Fellowes, in my view, serves us very well indeed.

Traffic lights in Thailand count down from 90 seconds, so that you know exactly how long you have to wait.

It strikes me that there is a lot to be said for this. Those of us not blessed with zen-like patience curse liberally at all the delays of modern life, but I don’t believe we really mind waiting: what really annoys us – what raises all those ulcers, trips all those heart attacks and tips us over into madness – is not knowing how long we have to wait.

I was in the waiting room at our local health centre the other day, and the time for my appointment had long passed. Had they overlooked my appointment? Had the doctor been called out to an emergency? What was wrong? What should I do?

I didn’t mind waiting. I understood that it might be necessary. But what I really need to know is how long I have to wait. And, if at all possible, why.

Is this too much to ask? Why is the bus not coming? Is it coming at all? Have I missed it, or has it been cancelled? How long must I stand in the rain?

There is a long tailback on the motorway. Nothing is moving.Well, it happens. But how long will it take to sort out? Will I reach my destination today? Should I ring home, and if I do, will a policeman pop up from nowhere and charge me with using a mobile phone while driving? Has it turned into a crime scene? I really need to know these things.

I am in the slow queue at the post office. Why is it slow? How long is it going to take for that young woman to post a second-class penguin to Siberia? Why does she need a receipt?

My book has not arrived from a retailer in America. How long is it supposed to take? What could go wrong? How long will it in fact take? Tell me, tell me.

It seems to me that we could take most of the stress out of society by simply informing people how long they have to wait, and why. The technology is there: it may be expensive, but think of the money the NHS would save.

They’ll do it in the end: just wait. I don’t know how long.

I was pulled over by the police on the A17 a few days ago. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” they said – which shows how little they know me.

“Just talk to that nice lady over there. If you want to.” Or words to that effect. So I was treated by a female member of the local road safety partnership to a question and answer session that would have been appropriate for a teenager about to get into the driving seat for the first time. The only other listeners were my wife, an excellent driver who qualified nearly 40 years ago, and a couple who looked, if anything, more experienced than I was, with 46 years to my credit.

Unsurprisingly, the lady was concentrating on speed. But she did wonder if we knew about the Fatal Four. I suggested lion, elephant, rhinoceros and hippo, but apparently this was not what they were looking for. It turned out to be driving with no seatbelt; while using a mobile phone; while drunk or under the influence of drugs; and speeding.

I was right with her on the first three, but unfortunately I had an appointment: so I didn’t have time to explain to her that the real danger on the A17, and on most other roads, was people driving too slowly.

Driving slowly is a form of selfishness – a slow driver being much more concerned with himself than with other road users. He makes it hard for others to make progress; he shows no understanding of how to overtake and is unwilling to do so; he ignores queues forming behind him; he has little awareness of hazards; he does not react quickly; he dithers when forced to make a choice; he slows almost to a standstill when turning left; he brakes unnecessarily for corners and when something comes the other way; and he fails to accelerate quickly enough when joining a major road.

Nowadays, this general incompetence tends to be mixed with a generous slice of self-righteousness: vague and erroneous ideas about saving the planet, or slow being good in some indefinable way.

I have used the male personal pronoun, but of course slow drivers could equally easily be female. I do not want to be accused of prejudice.

On a road like the A17, where the “safety” partnership has kindly made it hard to overtake by popping in bollards and cameras at irritating intervals, the slow driver is a particular menace. After miles and miles of following a snail, even the most conscientious driver will want to make progress and be tempted to overtake dangerously. And we are not talking about speeders here; we are talking about competent drivers doing the sort of thing the police used to encourage – proceeding as fast as it is safe to drive.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to be pulled over by the police and told about the dangers of driving too slowly? Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The fatal four will never include tortoise, snail and slug, however justified that would be.

Here are a few questions it might be worth considering in the light (if that is the right word) of the Pakistan cricket allegations.

First, why do bookmakers accept such ridiculous bets? If they didn’t, the opportunities for the kind of scam alleged would never occur.

How much can bowling three no-balls affect the result of a Test Match? The over-reaction of the cricketers and commentators to the News of the World story is bizarre.

Why do we love to stand in judgement on people whose lives we know almost nothing about? Refusing to shake Amir’s hand or acknowledge his undeniable brilliance was childish and judgmental.

How much pressure do you think might be put on a talented 18-year-old bowler by more experienced members of the team? Could threats to his safety or that of his family be involved? Could his progress in the national team be involved? I am not saying this happened: I am just saying it might have. We don’t know.

We are fortunate to live in a country where the rule of law is upheld, we are not oppressed by huge natural disasters, and the Lake District is not under the control of the Taliban. Shadowy figures with the potential for violence rarely cross our paths. So can those calling for a life ban on the accused cricketers be sure that in no circumstances, ever, could sufficient pressure be put on them to bowl a no-ball at a specific time? It does, after all, seem a relatively harmless thing to do.

Would those calling for a permanent ban on Pakistan’s cricketers like to live in that country for a couple of years?

I am not, incidentally, saying the English are naturally honest, while foreigners aren’t. While staying in Italy recently, it was routine for shopkeepers to leave you alone in the shop with valuable merchandise while popping out to get something. And in Greece a few years back I mistakenly left my camera on the pavement while we wandered off up the street. Half an hour later it was still there.

Would that have happened in England? I’m not so sure. What I am sure about is that we would lose no time in condemning anyone dishonest, because we have such a high opinion of ourselves. We even get apoplectic about a woman popping a cat in a wheelie bin.

The prospect of thousands of speed cameras being removed from their pedestals and recycled into something useful is one that will delight thousands of experienced motorists.

In a typical piece of “unbiased” reporting, my local BBC station, Smug East, reacted to this news by interviewing the partnership leader whose job depends on the cameras (amazingly, he wanted to keep them) and quoting the ubiquitous Brake, who always say the same thing, whatever the question is. I suppose it saves research time.

As usual the strong arguments against cameras remained unexpressed. Here they are, in the words of Safe Speed, which has road safety, and not vacuous slogans, at heart.

“The awful tragedy and awful truth is that speed cameras have made the
roads more dangerous by replacing effective policies, by distorting
priorities, distracting drivers, damaging the public-police relationship, giving us false safety messages about speed, pretending that the speed limit gives a safety limit irrespective of conditions and taking away valuable and important thinking time.”

The disappearance of speed cameras is a good thing for road safety, but it is not the best thing. The best thing would be a complete reassessment of speed limits by people who are qualified to assess them (and not local residents and councillors). Traffic police, for instance.

If speed limits were accurately and realistically set, it would not matter whether there were cameras or not, because we all know that cameras are designed to catch people who are causing no danger at all.

With realistic speed limits – and this would mean increasing them in most cases, sometimes substantially – experienced drivers would be able to concentrate on what they are doing without worrying about being criminalised by people who ultimately have no interest in good driving.

Camera partnership leaders say quite openly that while they are happy
to run speed cameras and criminalise people, they have no idea – and don’t care – if the limits are properly set and appropriate to justify their cameras and their tickets in the first place. “It is not our business,” they say.

Of course not. Their business is raking in fines and getting drivers off the road.

Let’s hope the removal of incentives to install speed cameras is just the first step on the road to real road safety. It is one cut we can be thankful for.

The vicar in the new TV sitcom Rev is slightly less of a caricature than those we have become familiar with in the past. But he struggles with similar worldly issues, from abusive builders to colleagues with dubious driving forces.

In the opening episode the topic of church schools raised its head, with the scarcely ground-breaking but admittedly funny idea of parents using various forms of bribery to get their children through the doors.

I can hardly suggest that this does not happen, but they are not the kind of Church of England schools I am familiar with.

The hundreds of church primary schools in East Anglia, where I happen to live, are there to serve all the children in the community. They are there because historically the church wanted to educate children when no-one else was interested. And they are immensely popular precisely because of their grounding in the Christian faith, which is seen as enhancing the children’s education and providing a positive ethos for behaviour and relationships.

This is true whether the parents are Christian, secular or belonging to other faiths. In one school an inspector was told by Muslim parents that they valued their children’s Christian school precisely because it had a basis in faith. Other parents without any faith routinely say how much they appreciate the Christian ethos, because it has a beneficial effect on their children.

They feel loved, and they are optimistic about their prospects. They feel there is a reason for their existence. In stark contrast to many of their elders, they have high self-esteem.

To argue, as some have done, that all this is part of a plot to indoctrinate children is to misunderstand Christianity completely. It is not a club trying to attract more members than another club. It is an offer of love, forgiveness and spiritual completeness. It is an offer that remains open permanently and does not seek to coerce anyone. It is an offer that everyone is free to reject and remain loved.

That is what makes these schools special.

Unlucky for too long

The importance of being lucky in sport is often underestimated. We prefer to think that the best player or team always wins, but they don’t.

In tennis a bad line call can change a match; in football a wrong decision by the referee is frequently crucial; and in cricket especially batsmen are at the mercy of the umpire’s eye.

Commentators wax lyrical about a batsman who has scored a couple of hundred when he was in fact dropped on 2 and wrongly given not-out on 6. On the other hand a batsman who is mistakenly adjudged lbw for a duck has “failed again”.

The first man should really have scored 2 or 6, and the second might have gone on to a magnificent 200.

We are told that this kind of thing “evens itself out” – but does it? Maybe some brilliant players never made it because they were unlucky for too long…

Letters pages in newspapers are strange and alien worlds, dominated by “facts that everybody knows” and answers to questions no-one has asked. In short, they are political places, and I feel uneasy in them.

I occasionally cross their borders, but I know in my heart that it’s a waste of time. My opinions are not of the “everybody knows” kind, and I always attract swift retorts from people who do know, know exactly what they know, and know that what anyone else knows is not worth knowing.

Recently I wrote again on the subject of speed limits, which I happen to think are often dangerously low. I left the country immediately afterwards – not to avoid gangs of marauding tortoises, but because I had a holiday booked. So I may have missed some responses, but I did see two, both of which were typical in different ways.

One came from a resident of the Newmarket Road area in Norwich, who objected to my suggestion that 30mph was too slow a limit for a wide open road with excellent visibility and houses set back.

She said residents had asked for the limit, which I don’t doubt at all. They always do. But why had they wanted it? Because “pedestrians have to take their life in their hands to cross three lanes of traffic via the new refuge there because of the newly installed bus lane. Cars joining the main road from the slip road are required to perform a dangerous manoeuvre crossing the new bus lane…” and so on.

Clearly there is a problem, but it’s not a speeding problem: it’s a bus lane problem. If a bus lane makes it dangerous for pedestrians to cross, why have a bus lane? To save buses a few seconds? Why is there not a footbridge, or a pelican crossing?

I suggest that when traffic has been travelling at 30mph along there for a while, she will find it even more difficult to cross the road, because she will have a continuous slow-moving stream of metal to contend with.

She mentions cars illegally turning right across the bus lane: this is not a speed problem; again it is a bus lane problem. Why is it even possible to perform this manoeuvre anyway? What is the highways authority playing at?

Another letter started: “Mr Lenton suggests we should be concentrating on enforcing existing speed limits”, which I didn’t say and do not support.

Ideally I would like to see speed limits functioning in an advisory capacity, because speed itself is not a problem. On any given road it may sometimes be safe to go at 40mph, and at other times 20mph will be too fast.

Prosecution should be for dangerous driving, not exceeding an arbitrary, ill-chosen limit. This does of course mean having traffic police about, and that I do support.

Nevertheless casual newspaper readers are left with the impression that (a) I am in favour of strict enforcement of speed limits and (b) I don’t care if residents are knocked down as long as I can drive fast.

See what I mean by an alien world?

Everyone wants to be safe. But it is only in recent years that inhabitants of the United Kingdom have begun to feel that they have a right to be safe – that it is a reasonable expectation.

They are outraged that a fox should be in a child’s bedroom. Not frightened, but outraged. Foxes have no right to be in bedrooms. We live in a country shorn of dangerous wildlife, and that, apparently, is as it should be.

A gunman runs amok for reasons unknown, and we are outraged that the police did not stop him immediately. We have a right to be protected from gunmen, don’t we?

But humans are unpredictable, and can be pushed over the edge. Foxes are not tame. Life is not at all safe, actually.

It has been so sanitised that we think it is, and we think it should be. But why should it? Scientifically speaking, life exists on the edge of things, in precarious circumstances. As humans, we walk an unlikely tightrope.

It is astonishing, when you think about it, that over 30 million drivers on our roads manage to miss each other with astonishing regularity, given the often badly designed pieces of tarmac that they drive on, and the fact that many of them are not really very good at it.

It is surprising that immensely powerful forces of nature have tended to leave us alone most of the time. My generation is fortunate that its civilians have never been involved in war.

But we don’t have any right to our safe and easy way of life, and we may soon find it less safe and more difficult. We have no right to be outraged at that, and it is no good looking for scapegoats. We have to deal with it ourselves.

Good at gullibility

What would be the best possible outcome for the anti-Israel activists who boarded the recent Gaza-bound flotilla?

Surely that the Israelis would over-react and commit some act of violence against them that could be spun through the world’s media and used as more propaganda against Israel.

And that is exactly what happened.

Killing people is not good, even in the face of severe provocation, but it strikes me that you have to be particularly gullible to see the flotilla as peaceful victims.

Of course, gullibility is something that certain sections of the media are particularly good at.