There are many different indicators of the moral health of the country. At the macro level of sober statistics, we have crime, child poverty, divorce, abortion, church attendance and how often euphemisms like manhood and romp appear in the same headline. In terms of newspaper comment, free-thinking, hard-hitting, independently minded opinion-formers who are never afraid to go out on a limb all believe all the time that all ills can be traced to the high price of petrol. And speed cameras. And the failure to lock up all Muslim clerics for ever, particularly if they have only one functioning eye.

Down in the subjective folksy terrain of the illuminating personal encounter, we come to feet on seats, cycles on pavements, stereos on maximum, modifiers dangling where they ought not to dangle, take your pick. I take a relaxed view on these issues, except the price of fuel which obviously needs to rise higher, thus gently ushering people and freight on to feet, bicycles and trains. I do have a personal barometer of national turpitude, however, and it is how long it takes before all the lifebelts around Shadwell Basin are stolen.

Shadwell Basin is a former dock alongside the Thames here in Wapping. I cycle past it every day. Opened in the 1850s, closed in the 1960s, redeveloped in the 1980s, the basin is now used principally by the Tower Hamlets canoe club, several misanthropic fishermen and a few equally unfriendly geese. Placed at intervals on the dockside are a dozen metal posts, each supporting a bracket designed to hold a lifebelt. The lifebelts must be easy to remove, as otherwise it would defeat the point of putting them there.

Unsecured, however, all the lifebelts get stolen, by, I assume, witless young men. (A fair assumption, I think. A senior policeman once told me that half of all crime in my London borough, home to almost 200,000 people, could be attributed to 60 teenage boys.) The lifebelts are then replaced, and then they get stolen again, replaced, stolen, and so on.

The important factor (which I monitor) is the rate at which the lifebelts disappear, and in recent years, I regret to report, that rate has been accelerating. It used to be that a fair few belts would remain for months, so, provided you were prescient enough to start drowning near one of those, a passer-by would be able to help out. Now, all the belts go more or less overnight and the latest crop has yet to be replaced.

I am usually sceptical about claims that we're all going to hell in a handcart, but I know that 30 years ago, while I and my teenage friends engaged in many idiotic, bad and indeed downright criminal acts, we would never have been so anti-social as to steal a lifebelt. I hope whoever is taking them can swim.

No comment

Still, in most respects, behaviour continues to improve. Take our attitudes towards transvestites. Admittedly, from Little Britain to Lily Savage and farther back, to Victorian music hall, the Brits have always loved a tranny. And yet I was still heartened when, at a party in South Wales (not an area noted for its progressive views on cross-dressing) the two transvestites present elicited no comment from the other guests. None. Not even so much as one of the nudges in nudge-nudge. The man wearing a T-shirt advertising Luxury Mobile Lavatories raised more of a giggle.

When I discussed this with a friend, she said she'd been in a pub in the Cotswolds not long ago when, across the bar, a big, ruddy-faced son of the soil (he turned out to be a farm labourer) rose to refresh his pint. My friend wasn't sure what was more surprising, that this chap was wearing a white 1980s Bananarama-style ra-ra skirt, or that none of the other drinkers batted an eyelash. As it were.

Open wide

If extremist Muslim clerics often only have one eye, it's only fair to point out that Christian Scottish politicians have unfeasibly small mouths. Ian McCartney, Charlie Kennedy, Des Browne, John Reid, Michael Forsyth, Helen Liddell and (still the champion after all these years) George Robertson, yes indeed, small-mouthedness is no respecter of party political boundaries north of the Border. Averaged out (normal bottom lip, no top lip at all) Alex Salmond has got a small mouth too. Gordon Brown's mouth isn't especially small, but he makes that weird grimace at the end of a sentence, something he was learning to control back in the halycon summer of 2007 but which has now gone sadly freestyle once again. William Wallace, there's another one. I bet he had a small mouth as well.

Does small-mouthedness predispose Scots towards a political career? Or does politics select for small-mouthedness, but only in Scotland? Are there any Scottish politicians with normal mouths ? (I know Wendy Alexander has an enormous one.) Are there any small-mouthed Scots not involved in politics? This could be a fruitful genetic and cultural inquiry.

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