I am now 56-years-old, and my own children like to continually remind me that if there was a hill to be over, I would be not only be over it...

...but I’d be way past it and riding off into the sunset. But the nearer I get to 65, it is remarkable how young I think that is.

At school, I wasn`t the greatest of all academics, but I got there on a wing and a pray. If I needed help, to all.

I got an e-mail the other day, which read as follows:

Hiya Pal (I didn`t know who this person was)

Ow -R -U -I -M gud thanx

Was wundrn if U av N.E jobs goin at the bakeri –

Wil wrk ard – no probs

Let me no asap

Cu grg

That’s right, a letter for a job application, in text speak.

Enter Victor Meldrew: “I don`t believe it”  - a Job application in text speak; have we sunk so low in our educational expectations  to allow self-expression to fly in the face of etiquette in the written form, allowing them to communicate as they so wish?

My elder daughter is a primary school teacher, whose students are between eight and nine-years-old. She has them very much in control and they love her. Because of illness of another teacher she had to double up and teach two classes for the afternoon.

She had the audacity to set them a little homework, by asking them to take their reading book home, and ask “Mummy or Daddy” to sign the reading book after they had read a little to them, then bring it back to class the following day.

One parent came in and lambasted her for being so presumptuous that she (my daughter) actually thought the parents actually wanted to hear their child read. And this parents child is an eight-year-old who can`t read, and (now to my point, finally) we will have these children in our businesses in six or seven years’ time, who can`t read or calculate simple maths –or – do we already have them now, trying to send me a letter for a job application in text speak!