Brian Viner: Rudeness: you just can't get away from it

On Sunday morning, while gyrating extremely slowly round the Hanger Lane gyratory system in west London, my family and I witnessed a classic road rage incident that held the children utterly spellbound. A man in a van screamed a series of expletives that would have made a stevedore blush at a woman driving a small Mazda. Moments later, almost more disturbingly, he was on his mobile phone roaring with laughter. The victim of his abuse, I'm quite sure, spent the rest of the day in shock.

We watched him manoeuvre his van forward with only one hand on the steering wheel, all of us hoping, I confess, that he would collide with something bigger. Unfortunately, I know of only one example of just deserts being served after a road rage episode. It concerned my sister-in-law Jackie, who was driving with characteristic care along Roehampton Lane in south-west London, unaware that behind her was a man, in a van, becoming increasingly irate.

Eventually they reached traffic lights, where he screeched up alongside her, then reversed slightly until their vehicles were exactly level. He then lowered his passenger-side window, leant over, and subjected her to a barrage of obscenities. Jackie, growing ever more pale, locked her door and stared fixedly ahead. When the lights changed, the man slammed his foot on the accelerator, the joyous detail being that he had forgotten to move out of reverse gear. Carnage unfolded in Jackie's rear-view mirror as he slammed into the car behind him. She, meanwhile, tootled gently forwards, and doubtless got home long before he did.

These two stories illustrate how manners on Britain's roads have deteriorated markedly in the past couple of decades, a deterioration that Ian Gregory, who is standing down as chairman of the Campaign for Courtesy that he founded in 1986, specifies as a cause for particular concern.

In some other areas, Mr Gregory has seen gradual improvements. He cites the growing number of immigrant workers in bars, restaurants and hotels as a factor in rising standards of service, although in a way that's no less depressing than his conclusion about our roads. He concedes that his charity has been able to change very little. "A small organisation like ours often feels like it is just flapping at a great monster," he says.

We all have our theories about the reasons behind the collapse of politeness, from irresponsible parenting to vulgarity on television. I confess that a blanket of gloom descends on me when I walk into reputable bookshops and see titles such as Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? or Do Ants Have Arseholes and 101 other Bloody Ridiculous Questions stacked high. I can't claim that such words never pass my own lips, but I try to discourage my children from using them. I would also like to encourage them to spend time in bookshops, which ought to be treasure troves, largely free of shit and arseholes.

There will be some who think me an iredeemable prude for expressing these concerns. But really, how many of us get through a day without confronting some form of rudeness? Yesterday, about to alight a Bakerloo Line train at Paddington, I was barged by a man getting on. An hour later, on the other hand, I was myself rebuked by a fellow passenger on the 8.45 to Swansea, for taking a call on my mobile phone, albeit sotto voce, in the designated "quiet carriage" that I hadn't noticed I was in. We are all victims of Britain's increasingly impolite society, but in truth most of us are perpetrators too.

I pity those indifferent to sport

Some years ago, I blithely asserted to my wife that I could never become close friends with a man who didn't like sport. Yet two of my closest male friends now are both of the opinion that hardly anything could be more tedious than football, with the possible exception of rugby, cricket, golf, tennis etc. Nothing I write here will shake their conviction, just as nothing could induce me to waste an evening at an opera that could more profitably be spent staring at a freshly-painted ceiling, but I must say that I feel pity for them in this week of weeks, in which sport – in Shanghai, Sri Lanka, Marseille, Cardiff and even the Old Bailey – has been replete with thrillingly unpredictable drama.

* Next Monday it will be 20 years since the Great Storm of October 1987, when southern Britain lost 15 million trees and, more devastatingly although somehow less shockingly, 23 lives. The fall guy, as it were, was the BBC weather forecaster Michael Fish, who in a bulletin the evening before had cheerfully assured viewers that nothing too cataclysmic was on its way, and was consequently lampooned for years.

I always felt sorry for Fish, who retired in 2004 with his reputation still somewhat besmirched, but I gather that in a new book about the weather, Storm Force, he devotes a lot of space to denying that he was responsible for the "so-called gigantic cock-up". He also points a cold Fish finger at his former colleague Bill Giles, who apparently likewise underestimated the coming storm, but did not become a national laughing-stock.

Whatever, it seems to me that Fish has made a mistake in raising the matter again. Unless, of course, he feels a vested interest in not letting it blow over.