As a clapped-out old bore myself - so some readers say - I naturally feel drawn to others of the ilk. Thus I tuned in on Sunday to the preposterous (and overpaid) Michael Parkinson's Radio 2 show. How would Parky manage to irritate me this week?

Actually, it was not him but his guest Joan Bakewell who raised my temperature as I soaked in the bath - not because of her sexual allure, though her interviewer kept hinting at it, but because of her condescending stupidity.

She was in the studio to plug a book - naturellement; it's what Parky's for, as Kirsty Young noted this week - concerned with life after 70 (Bakewell is 73). The unexceptionable thesis she advanced on the show was that we should all try to be nice to one other.

"Concern for how the other person feels is very often lacking in how people go about their jobs and their social life. Their shopping - people don't smile at the person at the check-out who and here comes the bit I hate I always think has a wretched life."

How's that for a sweeping, insulting, downright wrong statement. Supermarket work may not be her style, but many enjoy it (and especially some of the older members of staff) just as much as she enjoys her life in the media. ("We are lucky - we are very lucky," she told Parkinson.) It seems to me that the 'thinking man's crumpet' has become a patronising old cow.