We now have generations of children who have trouble understanding English literature because they do not know the meaning a yard or a furlong or a quart

Doubloons and groats?

Funny that football commentators talk about a shot from "all of 30 yards" if it's so incomprehensible to most of the audience.

The use of foul names to describe pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds, once common among both white pupils and teachers, is now, thankfully, rare. It has rightly been squeezed out by public and official disapproval.

So, in the search for new sins to conquer, various pressure groups have been suggesting that racism can be detected in children as young as three or four. And if there is racism, the we're-victims-too rule means it has to be the same for all the other isms.

So that is how you get four-year-old transgender children, and Ofsted officials warning that 'schools must develop a positive culture' towards them.

Unfortunately, when this happens, the need to educate children tends to take second place.

I do not know how the Arab Spring will turn out and whether it is good news or bad news for the countries concerned and the rest of the world. But it wasn't the BBC's job to make my mind up for me.

This all comes less than a month after the Jubilee debacle when the BBC sent out pop culture presenters to cover a state event and proceeded to broadcast a fashion pundit talking about the hat Nelson wore at the battle of Waterloo.

We know the BBC has let us down badly with consistently slanted news broadcasts about matters of central importance: Europe, immigration, climate change. It has done nothing to challenge the perception that it routinely favours one political party over others.

But once upon a time everybody felt safe to rely on the BBC to report the really big foreign stories and the really big Royal occasions. No longer. The reputation of the Corporation is rotting.

The process that has led to weeks of compulsory poppy-wearing began 40 years ago or so, when Whitehall was certain that as the veterans of the world wars died, interest in commemorating the sacrifice of two generations would wither away. It didn't, and there was a public reaction to the obvious official lack of enthusiasm that made a lot of people determined to continue the remembrance tradition.

Now you get every twopenny celebrity and football pundit wearing poppies on TV from mid-October. Are they really mindful of the sufferings of their grandparents and great grandparents, or do the producers make them?

It would be less tacky, more likely to provoke thought and altogether more moving if remembrance were restricted to just one Poppy Day, as the Great War generation arranged it in the 1920s. Everything would stop for two minutes at 11 o’clock on 11 November. The event would have real impact.

As it is the poppy festival is turning into one more of the autumn's bad taste commercial events, complete with bumper poppies and jewelled poppies for the show-off element.