Yesterday, our commune was blessed with a large dump of snow. Setting the backdrop to this white duvet, like some depressive’s canvas, was a foggy swirl where the horizon had been. But by mid afternoon, both fog and snow had gone. The joy with which I greeted this outcome was somewhat disturbing: it reflected my need to do some food shopping, and get out and about meeting people.

But it was the opposite of what I would have felt as a child.

Snow, when your age is in single figures, is about the most magical thing that happens – after Christmas Day. Snow means throwing balls of snow, sledging on snow, rolling about in snow, and building snowmen out of snow. Later it means hands so cold they hurt, and lost gloves which – despite being bright red upon white a white cover – never reappear.

But a time comes when one or more damaged clowns – often the woodwork teacher, for some unknown reason – will fix us with a world-weary eye and say “The time has come to put away such childish things”. And then one ‘grows up’ – because somebody has decreed that only failure will accompany those who don’t. One of the stock insults I still get aged sixty-six (when suggesting radical change) is “FFS, grow up”. But what they really mean is “Will you FFS conform“.

After the age of about fifteen, most of us are so busy conforming, we lose the wonderment. The first time I took my elder daughter aged three to the movies, the curtains pulled back in the Empire Leicester Square to reveal an enormous screen. Anne-Marie just gaped at it. Once the film began, she didn’t say another word for two hours; but her REM was a sight to behold.

Children today mature – if that’s the right word – into a culture where conformity to mores and commitment to the company are almost everything. Large, culture-free corporations detest innovation, because innovation scares the shareholders. And powerful interest groups from bankers to the politically correct can’t abide criticism, because it threatens their belief systems. The fact that we only learn from having ideas, challenging the status quo, trying something new and then learning from mistakes seems never to occur to them. Their ideas are settled science, and deviation from that brands the maverick a non-violent extremist. The result is the sort of creative stagnation and corrupt privilege that finally did for the Soviet Union.

Let me challenge what doubts you have about such a sweeping statement. Walk up and down theatreland in London: what do you see? There are revivals, crossovers from other media, musical versions of dramas, and dramas derived from musicals. We have not had a genuinely new genre in the theatre since Kitchen Sink in 1956. Of course, we’ve had Stoppard and Bennett, and er, um…

While among the subsidised theatres and touring companies 1 production in 3 is new, in the so-called ‘commercial’ theatre, the number is closer to 1 in 8.

Name the last major emergence of a new musical genre. We’ve had jazz, blues, country, Rhythm and Blues, swing, rock n roll, Motown, and er, um…

When’s the last time you saw any form of art that suggested a worthwhile search for something beyond the pyrotechnics of a cow’s innards or an unmade bed?

Today, to get bums on seats, there are only two alternatives: to shock, or to serve up more of the same. Between 1865ish and 1930, we had six clearly discernible genres of art: impressionism, pointilism, abstraction, surrealism, cubism and primitive. The two greatest painters of the last seventy years (for me) are Francis Bacon and David Hockney: the first added a unique, self-taught form of terror and technique, and the latter embraced a broader technological appreciation of light. But since 1965ish, no qualitative artistic leap has been made.

The Sixties, in fact, was the last great outpouring of radicalism: satire, revue, pop art, Underground music, rock, agitprop, wild fashion and the abandonment of literary censorship. Having been there, looking back now I see most of it as shallow rubbish: but at least it was original.

The 1970s, I think, was the decade when pretty much everyone in a position of authority said “FFS, grow up”: Colourful Hippyism was bleached a Hard Left Grey by the punishing 60-degree wash of ‘reality’, and the one-time educational aspiration towards discovery morphed into providing proof that the syllabus had been “covered”. The process of robotisation had begun – and the Reagan/Thatcher administrations eventually cemented apolitical conformity firmly into place.

What we have lost is the Child’s Eye Voyager Gene, and we need to get it back. We have swapped religious worship for the worship of wealth and fame, and the two are equally dysfunctional.

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Let me close by relating something which, while France can be an infuriating, bureaucracy-strangled State, nevertheless still suggests the French have an ethical culture in some kind of working order.

Over the last six months I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of hiring a plumber. He called himself a central heating engineer, but I’ve met tunnel-dwelling moles with more idea about how to plan, construct, zone and calorifically estimate the sort of boiler and radiator mix required. Myself and the overseer eventually fired him off the site. Obviously –  as is the contemporary modus operandum – litigation is involved.

One indirect disadvantage of this situation is that the Knuckle Dragger is refusing to honour the boiler guarantee which is in his name. But as luck would have it, for twelve years now I’ve had a very honest and fair relationship with a boiler-servicing company in Agen. Their chap turned up the other day, and I explained the situation. He wandered about – genuinely interested – and trotted out five (to him) obvious faults in the design of the system. I thanked him (he only needed to service the boiler, not the rads – so it was nice of him to bother) and then yesterday I got an email from the company saying next year my servicing would be absolutely free. It was, said the email, a matter of principle: I’d paid €276 to have a brand-new boiler serviced through no fault of my own, and so in 2016 they’d be pleased if I accepted their offer to do it for nothing.

Now, not only is that very, very smart customer relations, it is also a commercial compassion that had me close to tears. You see, behaving like an incontinent polecat is not the only way to supply goods and services in this world.

Earlier at The Slog: Why Left and Right are united in Europe as never before