This basic but bountiful business of simple communication is now far too complicated and confused despite a vast array of helpful tools lined up to help along our information highway.

Trouble is they don’t tell you how to say what you mean or mean what you say.

I’m staggered by the number of folk who don’t know how to respond to a cheery "Good morning!”, even when they’re not whiling one away, good, bad or indifferent, by pirouetting , preening and prattling on a mobile phone or some other mechanical wizardry in the street.

Who first decided this might be a cool contribution to a trendy version of Normal for Norfolk?

A veritable hurricane of hyperbole is roaring through casual conversations to dominate mundane topics with exaggerated cries of “Wow!”, “ Fantastic!”, “Unbelievable!” and “Incredible!”. Those able to string a kind of sentence together hit the heights with: So,… yeh, know what I mean, like …” 

They usually finish up sharing those virulent favourites “Gutted!” and “Gobsmacked!”.

I’m worried at the amount of Westminster and Whitehall claptrap seeping into chats on my social rounds.

“Positive feedback” and “worst-case scenario” are bad enough but I know they are simply pacesetters for the dreaded level playing-field at end of the day.

I’m convinced we ill be fed even bigger diets of facile soundbites and soppy slogans, lazy abbreviations and tiresome trendybabble spawned by so-called celebrities  before someone makes a fortune running evening classes in old-fashioned mardling and proper  joined-up writing. With no tweeting and texting in the interval.

How refreshing it would be to hear a bit of good old Norfolk dialect let loose in exclamations like “Cor, blarst me, thass a rum ole dew!”, “That road dunt go nowhere, that stay here where thass wanted” and “I’m in favour of  progress long as that dunt change noffin!”.

How some of us yearn for those good old days when politicians and journalists shared comparatively straightforward ideas and ideals.

You knew where you stood with peace in our time before the wind of change ran through the pound in your pocket, Then along came Barbara Castle  to usher in a rather worrying new era dubbed In Place of Strife.

I remain convinced she meant to launch a Blackburn pop group of that name with Clause Four as main support on the bill but spin doctors were beginning to exert exorbitant pressure on our national psyche

They have ruled our hearts-and-minds charts  ever since, although Back to Basics  suffered one major blip when a pun-loving contributor to the New Statesman  (or it might have been the Oxnead Chronicle) suggested it told the story of a touching reunion at Luton Airport.

He put befuddled readers out of their misery with the legend  “Back to Bay Six”.

Sadly, such wit and invention  have been extremely rare in recent years, with Middle England  still looking for The Third Way, Cool Britannia flagging badly after a heady  start, Care in the Community letting down too many of those it was supposed to bolster and The Big Society taking little heed of Norfolk’s glaringly obvious -North- South Divide.

Old Tories, New Labour, Liberal Democrat Upstarts  and a few splinter groups  have formed a depressing coalition of glib voices making a perfect background chorus for a bigger, brasher production of Les Misérables, kindly sponsored by grateful bailed-out bankers and hard-up energy bosses. 

Cynical, moi? Goodness knows I’ve tried hard to believe we really are All In This Together. But it’s hard to ignore blatant signs of society ( whatever that is) being rent asunder by harsh economic  injustices and painful examples of widening cultural and generational chasms.

I think that’s what I happened across in a Cromer shop  a few trips ago when a woman of indeterminate years held court on the previous evening’s television.

She would not have tuned in herself  but her granddaughter called and hinted they should watch a programme all about winners in modern music.

“She loved it – but I didn’t recognise anybody on those Brat Awards. The racket was awful and I could not understand what they were talking about let alone their so-called lyrics referred to. You knew where you were with the likes of Val Doonican and The Spinners”

I wanted to tell her how the wind of change has blown through the music industry and we are unlikely to savour peace in our time again.

However, I couldn’t help wondering if she was just playing the innocent old gran to perfection. Brat Awards? Far too clever, surely, not to be deliberate.

Still, that’s a shade or two more appealing than what masquerades  for  hearty entertainment  and useful information while  too much television dumbs down almost to the point of going subterranean.

Taking too much of our precious language with it. Know what I mean, like?