The person outside my family I’ve known longest in my life died last weekend. Today was her funeral.

I think we all assume immortality until about the age of 45, at which point it dawns on one that no, they’re not going to discover the elixir during your lifetime. ‘They’ – whoever they are, usually medics – would do well to destroy the formula, if and when they ever find it. But the sniff of the Nobel Prize will be a much louder siren than the consequences of the discovery. Twas ever thus.

For me, the age of sixty was the only ‘significant’ birthday that has affected me. These days, I plant a tree and think, “I won’t be around to chop it down”. But oddly, the thought has less force than it would’ve had twenty years ago. ‘Putting something back’ is a cliche more worn than Max Clifford’s feigned philanthropy, but it does get more real over time. The thought is often challenged by those Bright Young Things in the media suggesting  life has been a bowl of cherries for we wrinklies. But most of the time I can rise above this, and just get on with it.

‘It’ these days (and yes, it drives my wife mad) is challenging palpable bollocks whenever I hear it or read it. But this is about civilisation running out of time more than my time getting shorter: the sheer, daunting mountain of brainless assumptions to be challenged (and unconsidered consequences to be tackled) means there is no time to be selective about what the bollocks is, or where one hears it. Only assertion followed by logical demolition will do – and the mistakes must be highlighted whenever seen.

The usual response to me doing this in company is an ageist insult, or “you don’t know what you’re talking about” – unaccompanied by evidence – or an accusation: racist, fascist, xenophobe, misogynist, and so on, ad nauseam. You hardly ever these days hear anyone say, “I’ve never thought about it like that”. All the soi-disant progressives want to do is shut you up; while one’s partner just wishes you’d shut up, period. I am a sufferer from the squeezed hand followed by the kicked shin. They are repetitive strain injuries – the audience’s reaction to repetition.

My friend who died was the same age as me. We met when we were five, and I can honestly say I’ve never met another woman capable of taking corporal punishment (which was common in schools back then) with such a look of slightly amused contempt. I fell in love with her instantly.

She had something of a raucous, roller-coaster of a life: a long affair with a schoolteacher in her late teens, a failed first marriage, and then a blissful second one – prior to which she had become a mature student, and then a special-needs infant teacher. Deserted by first hubby, she brought the kids up while all this was going on. She eventually wound up as a Deputy Head, and fought long battles against bureaucracy, lack of funds, and then – finally – cancer. She had four remissions – more than anyone could expect, but then she didn’t ‘expect’ anything from life.

Over the years she told me about feral kids, kids who stank of urine, kids she’d chased down the street after she caught them dragging a dog behind a car they’d stolen, and other stories I won’t relate because you might be eating. And if you are, please don’t read my blog with your mouth full in future.

All this was taking place in a neighbourhood which, when I was growing up there, was a quietly respectable lower-middle class suburb of Manchester thought by most people to be a bit posh. Today it’s a cross between somewhere the hurricane just hit, and a Middle-eastern war zone. Most of the shops have grilles heavy enough to stop an Apache helicopter. The free Grammar School to which many kids aspired was converted into a Comprehensive in the early 1970s, and then knocked down. Today, it’s a block of gated, super-expensive apartments. Where once there was a beautiful Edwardian pub with lots of banter and zero vomiting, there is now another gastro-chain based on portion control and getting as many high-margin drinks down the customers’ necks as possible. Everyone there is in shell-suits covered with logos, and their kids run riot in an area called ‘Playtime’, which might be better named ‘Killing Fields’. All the kids sport earrings, tattoos, expensive trainers – and either carefully manicured hair or a menacing bald-cut. And that’s just the girls.

Of all the countries in the developed world, Britain is unique in the deadly combination of muddle and greed that has been visited upon it…..and then encouraged by a media set which almost never chases a story any more – just the money. This is why I call the task of maintaining civilisation in the UK daunting.

From about 1963 onwards (the year of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial) those of a liberal persuasion gained the upper hand in Britain. And twenty-five years later – after the bourgeois, largely public-school educated Labour leadership had overspent, ruined the education system, ridiculed tradition and handed power within the Party to Trades Union block votes – a Right wing government dedicated to money, money, money and money reversed nothing that had gone before (outside of Union legislation) but instead ran away to a place called Mammon. Believing that wealth would trickle down and sort all the other mess out – “there is no such thing as society” – they intervened only when West Indians burned large parts of Brixton to the ground. They wuz ‘titled, innit? Well, the liberals thought they were. I was living there at the time, so I know what I’m talking about: middle class Leftie Councillors were helping prepare the petrol bombs.

But ‘greed is good and religion is for wimps’ had taken a firm hold. It took Labour years to realise this – and then give up, preferring instead to sell to the media, and leave the hacks therein to polish up and make credible the soundbitten tosh they were being fed by Alistair Campbell. Then they lost again, and an equally confused Tory Party failed to win. That brings us up to date: nobody won – and especially not us.

The combination I referred to earlier came not from conspiracy, but from bad science and incompetent management from politicians. It was, shall we say, a case of the Triumph of the Swill. (See Leni Riefenstahl). A lot of hogwash about ‘the State will provide for everything, everyone is nice and the National Front is a real threat’ was followed without a pause for breath by a pile of old poo trailing behind those at the trough – ‘help yourself to everything that used to belong to the State, to the Members, and your customers’.

We are back again at our usual staging post: a political class that caused the mess has no intention of clearing it up, because they deny it’s a mess. Family, community, the police, the economy, the public finances, farming, education, and public behaviour both high and low are in a disgraceful mess.

But the final irony is, if you even try to explain how you think it should be cleared up by having a better set of aims, they’ll call you a Nazi. Or a dreamer. Do I dream about getting out if this nightmare? I do, yes. Am I a Nazi? No, I’m not. I’m a Rational Realist.

My friend’s death knocked me back for a few days. With 10,000 more like her in the education system at all levels, we would be in a better place as a nation. Instead, we have a body of teachers’ unions about to go on strike….because they are muddled and greedy. With just 2,000 people like her in the banking sector, the public finances would be in far better shape. Instead, we have gang of amoral jerks who believe only they have the answer….because they are muddled and greedy. Another 1,000 hacks like her, and we’d have a media set interested in something beyond a lowest common denominator of tits, X-factors and emailing scrotal sacs. They write this shit – and it is shit, there’s no other word for it, excuse the language – because they are muddled and greedy.

As for the Unions, well – they own the Labour Party. The banks own the Tory Party. And Rupert Murdoch scares the living daylights out of both of them….with the shadowy Barclay Brothers not far behind. I’m not sure who owns the LibDems; the EU, probably.

But after a mortality shock, the mind is re-concentrated. The  future looks very simple to me: an apathetic and/or survival-obsessed electorate run by increasingly spineless and controlling politicos….with a drastic drop in our living standards, a police-force fed up of their superiors sucking up to MPs, and a level of National Debt we can’t possibly repay, given there is no real economy powered up to drive that process. For five years now we have had the means – access to the internet and its many weapons – to stop the rot, and throw out the robots incapable of smelling it. But that route has so far been used only by extremists – thus giving all governments everywhere the excuse to close it forever. We have, I fear, missed the boat.

It will be the same in many other countries too – most of the West in the end – but the experience will be unique here, because only here do we have this enervating melange of uncaring, ignorant masses revelling in the aftermath of their commonsense by-pass procedures. Only here do we have a nation held spellbound by muddled greed to quite this extent.

For the blogger – as I’ve written probably to excess already – a lone job as The Fool on the Hill is very unlikely to be fulfilling. And when a friend leaves for good, the obviously limited time the rest of us have makes me wonder if sorting this out requires people with a lot more energy and hope than I have left.