Why are sex and violence always bracketed together as bad things in films? Surely they're morally different? Sex - youthful incompetence and insensitivity aside - is a good thing, both as leisure activity and biological necessity. Most people, however, (leave sadists out of it) agree that apart from in highly specific circumstances, the less violence there is around, the better. Yet sex'n'violence get shoved together like fish'n'chips, as if they're equivalent pieces in the same ethical jigsaw.

When they are awarding certificates for films, violence often gets an easier ride than sex. Murder, torture, beatings are commonplace in 12s and even 12As, and yet in the same classification you don't get to see so much as a bare bottom. In my day, the Seventies, if you were allowed to stay up, it was chocks away every Wednesday night on Play for Today. Never did me any harm.

This year the Crampton family settled down for my son's 11th birthday DVD treat. We'd gone for Beowulf, certificate 12. Within ten minutes, a huge horrible terrifying monster was ripping Vikings in half and hurling them around the village hall. Never mind the birthday boy, his 43-year-old father was hiding under a blanket. Beowulf was promptly ejected. Maybe my son can watch it for his 18th, but I won't be joining him.

In place of the nightmare-inducing medieval carnage, with some parental reluctance (but not much because we didn't have a lot else to choose from), we inserted The Heartbreak Kid. The box gave warning of strong language and comic sex scenes, hence the 15 certificate. And indeed Ben Stiller and his wife got down to it on a couple of occasions (which was fair enough as they were on their honeymoon), yet I am confident that my son will survive the experience unscathed. What's more, I hope the message got through that sex in a 15 is preferable to violence in a 12. After all, happiness in a male adolescent is achieved by maximising your experience of the one while minimising your exposure to the other.

Numbers racket

Here's a useful discovery that I feel honour-bound to pass on. You know when you call to pay your credit card? And you want to speak to a person but instead have to go through that rigmarole of punching in your date of birth and what number is the letter Q in your mother's maiden name? Yes? Well, all you have to do to shortcircuit the whole process is to make a mistake. Just deliberately put in the wrong number, at which point, for security reasons, they put you straight through to an operator. After that you can transact your business with a real live talking human being.

Leaky defence

It is not often that I am genuinely shocked watching the news, but as another Ministry of Defence bureaucrat loses another load of top-secret stuff, and the newsreader says: “This brings the number of MoD laptops stolen to...” I was expecting 5, or 15, or 20 at a pinch, and she says 659! Six hundred and fifty nine! Since 2004! Plus 121 memory sticks mislaid as well! By my calculations, 780 computers and memory sticks nicked in four years equates to almost four every week, a shade over one every other day, no doubt more in the interval between my filing this piece and its being published. I know that the MoD is a big organisation, but the day cannot be far off when one of its employees managing to hang on to a digitalised store of sensitive information becomes more newsworthy than losing one.

Old-time dancing

One way in which British society has indisputably improved is that you now see old people dancing as a matter of routine. Not just the formal ballroom dancing they learnt in the Stone Age (although I admire that as well) but proper get-on-down unselfconsciousness booty-shaking to classic disco and soul. I've been at four do's in the past few months, in the Vale of Glamorgan, in the West Country, in southern Spain and in the Gulf, where, as soon as the band or the DJ started up, the floor instantly filled with people of 50, 60, 70, 80-plus eager to cut some rug. An excellent development.

The estate we're in

A friend has a photograph in her hallway of her and her mum taken on the council estate in North London where she grew up. Another friend, raised in a rather more salubrious part of the capital, admired the gritty windswept brutalism of the picture and asked if it had been taken on a trip to Moscow, or perhaps Warsaw? “No,” said the first friend. “That's the Marquess estate in Islington.”

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